European Mountain Convention 2012 - Chambéry, France

Youth to the top: the mountain path to the future! 

Creating a future for young people in mountain areas 

The objective of this year's European Mountain Convention is to discuss the potentials mountain areas offer to young people and to evaluate the conditions that are needed to unlock the attractiveness of mountain areas for young people. The convention will provide the participants with knowledge on and opportunities to discuss difficulties and good practices responding to specific issues and policies concerning youth in the mountains.

Like all other European Mountain Conventions, this edition aims to be the most important event of the year on the European political agenda for actors from mountain areas.

Mountain areas have very important assets in terms of quality of life: community exchanges particularly intense, a rich traditional culture, access to a protected environment and leisure activities as well as many different job opportunities. But these spaces are often dependent of an image shifted, sometimes sluggish, nor diversified.

This Convention will fight this shifted image with arguments highlighting the richness and strengths of these areas and address the current problems that young people (and mountain inhabitants in general) face on a daily base offering transferable solutions to these problems.

Thus, the key issues for this Youth Convention are "How to keep young people in mountain areas: how to settle back after graduation and how to attract new young people, individual or family from other territories in our mountain regions?"

Objectives

The event should seek to:

• review the problems and key issues of young people living in the mountain area from the existing realities on the field
• identify things to be improved in the short, medium and long term in order to meet the needs identified
• Identify the needs of young people who do not live in mountain areas that should be satisfied in order to encourage them to settle here
• enrich the discussion with examples of initiatives that have improved the lives of mountain youth (i.e. generating diversified employment, offering cultural activities, creating better opportunities for education and training, etc.).
• encourage young people to become more involved in developing solutions tailored to their needs whether local, national or European
• propose policy recommendations for decision makers present, from different levels (European, national and regional / local) with very concrete proposals in terms of instruments and tools. The aim will be to ensure sustainable development of mountain regions through an increased involvement of young people and the building of an action plan for the future actions of Euromontana and European mountain regions (charter, partnerships, projects, exchanges, etc...) on the theme of youth and with youth from mountain areas.

Languages of the conference:

The debates during the conference will be translated to and from : French, English, Italian and Romanian.

Registration:

Will be done on-line through this website, starting from early June.

Conference venue:

The event is being organised in the Manege conference centre, very close to the city centre of Chambéry and accessible from a vide range of hôtels.

Manège Conference Centre, 331 rue de la République, 73000 Chambéry

Draft agenda:     

This conference is organised in cooperation with the region Rhône Alpes