From volunteerism to participation: rethinking the role of people in nature recovery
There has been increasing discussion about whether the nature sector has historically relied too heavily on volunteers, and whether this has contributed to a perception of conservation as an amateur rather than a professional activity. There is some validity in the underlying argument. For many organisations, particularly those working with limited resources, volunteers have not simply supplemented professional teams. They have provided capacity that otherwise would not have existed. That has enabled an enormous amount of work to happen, but it can also make long-term planning more difficult when an organisation's ability to deliver depends on who happens to be available, what skills they have and how much time they can give.
From volunteer capacity to professional capacity
That is not a criticism of volunteers. It is a reflection of how much of the sector has historically had to operate. Conservation developed in circumstances where resources were often limited, public engagement was important and voluntary effort could make the difference between a project happening or not happening. There is considerable value in what that model has achieved, but the circumstances in which the sector operates are changing.
Nature is increasingly being recognised not simply as something to protect, but as part of the infrastructure on which society depends. Natural systems have implications for water management, flood resilience, carbon, biodiversity, food production, health, tourism and the quality and resilience of the places in which we live. As that understanding develops, nature recovery is increasingly being considered as a strategic issue rather than simply a collection of individual conservation projects.
That creates a different requirement of the sector. If nature is strategic infrastructure, the organisations responsible for managing and restoring it need clear objectives, longer-term planning, appropriate governance, measurement, investment and professional capacity. Some of the work that has historically been delivered through goodwill and voluntary effort will need to be properly resourced if it is to be delivered at the scale now required.
But professionalisation does not have to mean closing the sector to people outside it. It can instead provide a framework within which the knowledge, skills and experience of a much wider group of people can be useful.
There is a significant difference between relying on volunteers because there is not enough capacity to employ people and deliberately creating opportunities for people to contribute to a professionally led programme of work. The first is a response to scarcity. The second can become a strategic choice. Once an organisation has clear objectives and priorities, it is better placed to understand where external knowledge and practical experience can genuinely add value.
What happens when professional knowledge meets the landscape
At Inversnaid, I have seen examples of this. A retired doctor who had previously volunteered in South Africa shared practical approaches and tools that we are now using here. Conservation practitioners from New Zealand have brought experience developed in a very different ecological and operational context. Academics and people from other professional backgrounds have contributed knowledge and perspectives that would not otherwise have been available.
The value of those contributions is not that they replace professional conservation expertise. It is that they introduce knowledge from outside the immediate discipline and allow it to be tested against a real landscape and a real set of problems.
The same principle applies to the experience gained by people doing the work itself. Rhododendron ponticum is a good example. It is easy to describe rhododendron clearance as a conservation task, but anyone who has spent several days doing it at Inversnaid will understand that it is considerably more complicated. The density and growth of the plant, the terrain in which it occurs and the difficulty of achieving effective control make it an expensive and long-term restoration problem. Spending time on the ground exposes practical constraints in a way that reading about the problem cannot.
This becomes particularly relevant as nature recovery becomes increasingly connected to other professional disciplines. There are people developing natural capital metrics, ecological models, climate strategies, policy frameworks and investment approaches for nature. All of that work has an important role to play, but there is also value in spending time in the landscape that those models and strategies are attempting to describe. Seeing how water actually moves across a slope, how difficult restoration work can be, how vegetation responds to intervention or how slowly a landscape changes adds a different dimension to professional understanding. It does not replace the model or the strategy. It gives them context.
Time matters here. A short volunteering experience can provide an introduction, but spending several days or a week in a landscape allows people to experience changes in weather, working conditions, tasks and the landscape itself. They begin to understand that restoration is rarely a linear process and that decisions made on paper can become considerably more complicated when they meet terrain, water, vegetation and weather.
What happens after people leave
That experience can also influence what people do when they leave. Someone may take an idea back into their professional life, become involved in a project in their own community, introduce a different perspective into their organisation or simply begin to look differently at the landscape around them. The value of the experience is therefore not necessarily confined to the work completed while someone is present. Its influence can continue elsewhere.
There is a social dimension too. People from different generations, countries and professional backgrounds can work together on something tangible, often in circumstances very different from their normal working lives. They have to solve practical problems, adapt to changing conditions and work alongside people they might otherwise never have encountered. This is different from an abstract team-building exercise because the team is actually trying to achieve something.
Some of those relationships continue after people leave. Volunteers return to Inversnaid, keep in contact with people they met here, bring friends back or form friendships and networks that have little obvious connection to the original volunteering experience. These outcomes can be difficult to capture through conventional project measures, but they can contribute to a much broader connection between people and place.
There is also a longer-term dimension that I think is particularly important. Nature does not operate according to financial quarters or annual reporting cycles. Restoration often involves significant costs and effort at the beginning, while the benefits may take years to become visible. People who return to a landscape can see changes that would be invisible to someone who visited once. Areas that were being cleared begin to regenerate, work undertaken in one season makes sense when seen again in another, and the landscape provides a visible record of what has happened.
That creates a different relationship with the work. Someone who returns is not simply repeating a volunteering experience. They are seeing the consequences of something they helped to create. They have a personal reference point against which to understand change, and that can make the longer-term nature of restoration much more tangible. The investment of time becomes connected to something visible and continuing.
This is where I think the role of volunteers needs to evolve. Voluntary effort can provide labour and capacity, but it can also create knowledge, relationships, skills, responsibility and a continuing connection to a place. None of this reduces the need for professional expertise. If nature is to be treated as strategic infrastructure, professional capacity, clear objectives and proper resourcing are essential. The opportunity is to bring these different forms of knowledge and effort together more deliberately, creating opportunities for people to understand a landscape, contribute meaningfully to its recovery and take that understanding back into the places and organisations where they live and work. If rewilding is ultimately about developing a different relationship between people and the natural world, then people cannot simply be observers of the process. Professional expertise and wider involvement should not be competing models; they can be part of the same approach to long-term nature recovery.
