What young people told us about water

On the coast of Lesvos, a facilitator handed a group of young people a bucket of water and asked them to share it. What followed was not a conversation about hydrology. It was a conversation about who decides, who is left out, and what happens when the people affected by a decision are not in the room when it is made.

That exercise sits somewhere near the centre of what FLOWGEN found. Across four countries, young people did not treat water as a technical problem. They treated it as a question of justice - and then told us, with some precision, why they have stopped expecting to be consulted about it.

What we did

Between autumn and early December 2025, the four FLOWGEN partners ran national focus groups: Kersnikova Institute in Slovenia, LATRA in Greece, Youth Bridges Budapest in Hungary, and Esplai Social in Spain. Participants included young people, youth workers, university students, environmental professionals, NGO volunteers, people working in tourism, fishing and coastal services, and staff supporting minors at a migration centre.

The sessions were built on desk research and structured around four themes: water justice and governance; youth participation and leadership; the blue economy and entrepreneurship; and skills, education and recognition. Methods were participatory - storytelling, collective mapping, visual facilitation with flipcharts, the water-bucket exercise, round-table dialogue.

Finding one: the blue economy is invisible until it is local

Awareness of the blue economy was low in every country. This is not a criticism of the participants; it is a finding about how the concept is communicated. Asked what it meant, young people reached for what they could see. In Greece: fishing, tourism, boating, maritime services. In Slovenia: environmental entrepreneurship. In Spain: biotechnology, coastal engineering, marine biodiversity.

And then something shifted. Once the discussion connected to local reality - a sustainable boat tour, a coastal clean-up, tourism pressure on the water supply, a circular-economy project down the road - recognition was immediate. Participants generated opportunities readily: eco-tourism, environmental monitoring, biodiversity protection, community-rooted enterprises that create decent work. The lesson for anyone designing blue economy education is uncomfortable and useful. The abstraction does not travel. The example does.

Finding two: participation exists, and it is not believed

The most consistent finding across the four countries concerned decision-making. Young people described participation mechanisms that exist on paper and change nothing in practice. Spanish participants called them tokenistic. Greek participants described unclear pathways, uneven access between urban and rural areas, and information that never arrives. Hungarian participants pointed to the absence of practical civic education. Slovenian participants wanted structured routes through schools, NGOs and youth centres, because the informal ones lead nowhere. In Spain, a specific gap surfaced: nobody had ever taught them how civic action works - how a petition is organised, how a demonstration is convened, what happens afterwards. Yet the willingness was universal. Participants in every country said they would engage where the opportunity was accessible, locally relevant, hands-on, and visibly consequential. What they had learned to distrust was not participation. It was the performance of it.

Finding three: the learning is real and the recognition is not

Young people described acquiring the competences that the blue transition requires - environmental literacy, digital skills, communication, project management, teamwork, critical thinking - largely outside formal education. Through volunteering. Through activism. Through community work. Slovenian and Greek participants were explicit that experiential learning had taught them the most.

And almost none of it counted anywhere. Spanish participants valued certification only where it connected to official recognition and employability; micro-credentials struck them as promising but not yet trusted or understood. Hungarian participants named critical thinking, empathy and perseverance as foundational - precisely the competences no certificate records. Across all four groups, participants supported flexible certification systems that recognise more than one route to competence, and asked that training be connected to real labour-market pathways rather than ending in a document nobody reads. Climate-resilience education was named as a gap in every country.

Finding four: four countries, one question, four accents

The convergence was striking, and so were the differences.

• Slovenia framed water through governance and long-term climate planning, invoking the constitutional protection of drinking water, and objecting to reactive responses to floods rather than planning for them.

• Greece produced the most concrete connections between the blue economy and how people actually earn a living, and the sharpest account of climate pressure - flooding, drought, pollution, coastal degradation.

• Spain foregrounded regional inequality in the cost and quality of drinking water, and the pressures of mass tourism and urbanisation on systems that were not built for them.

• Hungary framed water as a human-rights and ethics question, contesting the charging of vulnerable groups for a basic need, and holding industry - manufacturing, and the digital and AI sectors - to account for its consumption. One observation from the Hungarian session deserves to travel further than this article. Participants raised artificial intelligence unprompted, not as an environmental cost but as an epistemic one: it is changing how young people learn and process information, and making it harder to build an accurate picture of the world. In a discussion about water, that is not a digression.

What this changed

Research that does not change anything is an expensive way to confirm what you already believed. These findings did change things, and it is worth being specific about how. 

The FLOWGEN Methodology Guide is written against them. Because young people learn outside classrooms and receive no credit for it, the project builts a microcredential system that recognises applied, transversal and prior learning, and accepts visual, oral, collaborative and action-based evidence rather than requiring written work. Because participation is distrusted where it is symbolic, FLOWGEN’s design puts young people in charge of actual interventions in their own communities. Because the blue economy only becomes legible through local examples, the training material is built from them.