About the International Union for Conservation of Nature - IUCN

IUCN is the world’s oldest and largest global environmental network - a democratic membership union with more than 1,000 government and NGO member organizations, and almost 11,000 volunteer scientists in more than 160 countries. IUCN’s work is supported by more than 1,000 professional staff in 45 offices and hundreds of partners in public, NGO and private sectors around the world. Its headquarters are based in Gland, Switzerland.

IUCN’s work focuses on valuing and conserving nature, ensuring effective and equitable governance of its use, and deploying nature-based solutions to global challenges in climate, food and development. IUCN supports scientific research, manages field projects all over the world, and brings governments, NGOs, the UN and companies together to develop policy, laws and best practice.

The internship will be based in the IUCN European Regional Office but the intern will be jointly supervised by the EU Partnerships Officer and the Director of Global Strategic Partnerships (based in Switzerland). Working in collaboration with other staff the intern will support both global work in respect to donors and work in relation to the European Union.

Globally, the EU Partnerships Intern will support the Strategic Partnership Unit (SPU) and this work will be supervised by the Director of Global Strategic Partnerships. The Unit is responsible for identifying and managing strategic partnerships with IUCN’s donors as well as coordinating IUCN’s overall resource mobilization efforts. The mission of the intern will be to support
SPU in a variety of research, communications, and logistics tasks.

At a European level, under the supervision of the EU Partnerships Officer, the function of the EU Partnerships intern has a particular focus on the opportunities that are offered by the European Institutions for funding Biodiversity Conservation and to assist the IUCN global secretariat staff in its fundraising activities with the EC.

The incumbent furthermore assists in the implementation of IUCN EURO’s work programme with regard to the liaison with the European Institutions (mainly the European Commission and the European Parliament) regarding key nature conservation policies with a focus on EU External activities such as illegal wildlife trafficking, the implementation of Agenda 2030 for sustainable development and the new Multiannual Financial Framework.

Specific tasks
Focus of the internship will be on assisting in efforts to identify potential EU funding for the IUCN global network as well as to
provide general support to the activities of the EU Partnerships Officer, including
some policy and project related activities. This assignment will also include the following responsibilities:
• Provide support to the IUCN offices worldwide in accessing EU funding and exploring relevant EU funding instruments;
• Background research/intelligence gathering (desktop) on selected bilateral donors and multilateral institutions. This will include
analysis and synthesis of information on their development policies, environment and conservation strategies, partnership and
funding priorities.
• Conduct (desktop) research/intelligence gathering on EU policies and processes related to nature conservation and
sustainable development (e.g. search for upcoming events & policy calendars, research background information, EC
consultations etc.);