ELTI's 20th Anniversary Symposium

ELTI’s 20th Anniversary Symposium & Reception

Surprises, Lessons Learned, and Unanswered Questions

Monday, September 14, 2026
Yale School of the Environment
Burke Auditorium, Kroon Hall
4:15–6:45 pm, followed by a reception

The Environmental Leadership & Training Initiative (ELTI) is a program of the Yale School of the Environment dedicated to strengthening the capacities of land managers, practitioners, decision-makers, and others working to conserve and restore human-dominated tropical forest landscapes.

Over the past 20 years, ELTI has designed and delivered place-based, experiential courses and programs on a wide range of strategies and topics across the global tropics through field-based, online, and blended formats, reaching more than 5,000 individuals. Through this work, ELTI has contributed to the development and application of field methods and to academic theory on how to effectively advance conservation and restoration in diverse social, ecological, and institutional contexts, with lessons that have relevance beyond the landscapes in which these efforts take place.

The ELTI 20th Anniversary Symposium will draw upon two decades of experience as an opportunity to reflect critically on what ELTI has learned about capacity development and its contributions to enduring, positive change in tropical forest landscapes. A primary goal of the symposium is to create an open and reflective conversation among YSE faculty who serve as ELTI Steering Committee members and program contributors, ELTI staff based at YSE, and ELTI’s partners who host ELTI’s field-based programs. Bringing these different perspectives together will provide an opportunity to reflect on ELTI’s experiences across the tropics and to consider what they reveal about how ELTI’s approach to capacity strengthening contributes to meaningful and lasting change.

The discussion will be organized around two primary questions:

1. What Has Surprised Us and What Has Mattered Most?
   • What have ELTI’s experiences revealed that challenged expectations or conventional assumptions about capacity strengthening and behavioral or organizational change? Where have outcomes been unexpected, unusually significant, or perhaps less significant than anticipated? What have participants and partners taught ELTI about why and how positive and lasting change happens, or does not happen?
   • The panel will also consider what ELTI has learned about the aspects of its approach that appear to have mattered most. What outcomes or experiences have had the greatest and most lasting value? How and why have knowledge, skills, relationships, and capacity translated into individual or collective action, organizational change, and broader social and ecological outcomes? What lessons can be drawn and shared with others from two decades of experience?
2. What Remains Puzzling? Unanswered Questions and Challenges for ELTI
   • ​Despite two decades of experience, many questions remain about how capacity development in general, and ELTI’s approach in particular, contributes to lasting change. Why do some participants apply and share what they learn while others do not? What determines whether individual changes translate into organizational or landscape-level outcomes? How can ELTI understand its contribution when outcomes emerge over long periods of time and through the actions of many different actors? What if ELTI’s contributions at one scale lead to adverse unintended consequences at another?
   • This panel will explore what ELTI still does not understand, what outcomes remain difficult to measure or document, and what questions should guide ELTI’s learning over the next decade.

For more information on this event, please email Melanie at melanie.burgos@yale.edu.