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Children as drivers of change: The operational support of young generations to conservation practices

ABSTRACT Children are the target of educational actions, both as passive subjects to whom conservation strategies are directed, and as active participants able to support operational management actions. Conservation actions driven by children can play an important role in critical social contexts where external (anthropogenic threats) and internal (organizational weaknesses) conditioning factors hinder effective protected areas management. In this article, we propose a case study where children involved in conservation practices offer operational support to overcome internal weaknesses of a park agency, motivate parks, staff and mitigate a series of anthropogenic threats. We used the “threat analysis” approach, derived by the Theory of Change, to define a causal chain linking ecosystem targets, human-induced threats, and conservation measures in a framework. We believe that conservation driven by children can be an innovative way to implement protected areas management in socially-degraded landscapes to the point of fostering local support for conservation.