Public Advocacy Lead

The Public Advocacy Lead enhances WWF‑Romania’s impact on public policy and societal narratives by connecting conservation science, policy solutions, and public discourse into coherent influencing pathways through high‑quality advocacy, public affairs, and policy-focused communications that strengthen biodiversity conservation and advance nature‑positive, climate‑resilient, and just transition.

The role acts as the senior coordinating interface between conservation expertise and decision‑making arenas, providing strategic guidance for WWF‑Romania’s external influencing work. It ensures that institutional priorities and policy content are translated into clear influencing priorities, coherent strategies, consistent messaging, and high‑impact initiatives.
The position leads a multidisciplinary team of policy, advocacy, and communications experts, ensuring outputs are science‑based, policy‑relevant, strategically framed, aligned with WWF‑EPO and global frameworks, and integrated across projects, organizational processes, and external partnerships.

Situated within the Conservation Team, the role works closely with Public Engagement & Fundraising (FUMACO), WWF‑CEE leadership, WWF‑EPO, and network‑wide influencing mechanisms to amplify WWF‑Romania’s policy voice at national, regional, and EU levels. Coordination with FUMACO, including the Brand Manager, ensures brand consistency while maintaining a distinct, policy‑oriented advocacy mandate focused on decision‑makers and governance systems.
As part of the Conservation Management Team, the role contributes to strategic planning, risk management, and organisational priority‑setting, while providing senior advisory support to the Conservation Director to ensure influencing efforts drive long‑term conservation impact.

Your duties will include:

• Provide senior functional leadership for WWF‑Romania’s external influencing, ensuring that policy positions developed with the thematic teams feed into a prioritised, organisation-wide advocacy framework.
• Coordinate the consolidation of policy and technical inputs from thematic expert teams into clear positions, policy asks and influencing strategies.
• Ensure alignment with WWF‑EPO (European Policy Office) and WWF‑CEE (Central and Eastern Europe) advocacy frameworks and processes.
• Build and maintain strategic relationships with ministries, agencies, parliamentary committees, and relevant authorities at all levels.
• Represent WWF‑Romania in consultations, advisory bodies, and multi‑stakeholder processes in line with agreed positions.
• Monitor national and EU policy cycles, identify windows of opportunity and risks, and advise on positioning and influencing routes.
• Coordinate institutional participation in hearings, briefings, high‑level meetings, and key public affairs moments.
• Strengthen WWF‑Romania’s role in coalitions and governance platforms.
• Lead the development of advocacy communications products (policy briefs, position statements, op‑eds, messaging packages, and cross‑cutting narratives).
• Oversee planning and delivery of advocacy initiatives (policy launches, visibility moments, campaign‑style interventions).
• Ensure strategic framing and consistency of messaging across all influencing outputs.
• Coordinate with FUMACO to ensure that advocacy communications comply with brand standards and complement broader public‑facing activities.
• Work with project teams to ensure that advocacy deliverables are timely, coherent, high‑quality, and contribute to policy outcomes.
• Provide guidance on reactive communications and positioning in response to emerging policy or contribute national perspectives to global advocacy moments and network campaigns.
• Lead, coach, and develop a multidisciplinary team across policy, advocacy, and communications.
• Define team workplans, priorities, quality standards, and workflows.
• Strengthen organisational capacity for advocacy, public affairs, and strategic communications.
• Foster collaboration across conservation, communications, fundraising, and project management.
• Provide functional oversight for policy, advocacy, and communications staff delivering project‑funded outputs, ensuring coherence with WWF‑Romania’s advocacy framework.
• Coordinate with the PSP & Project Management Lead and the relevant Thematic Lead to ensure accurate integration of policy, advocacy, and communications inputs into project development.
• Ensure strategic alignment of project‑related policy, advocacy, and communications deliverables with institutional positions
• Maintain portfolio‑level oversight of the policy/advocacy/communications components across the project cycle to identify synergies, manage risks, and ensure consistency and quality across the conservation portfolio.
• Contribute to organisational strategic planning, annual advocacy priorities, and cross-programme coordination as part of the CMT.
• Ensure alignment between project-based advocacy and communications work and WWF‑Romania’s organisation‑wide advocacy framework.
• Represent WWF‑Romania at events, conferences, and public forums as a solutions-oriented policy actor.
• Promote and support collaborative platforms for nature and climate governance.
• Act as spokesperson on delegated topics, in coordination with the Conservation Director and FUMACO team.

We expect from you:
Adhere to the WWF mission, as well as LIVE in line with the WWF Values: Courage, Integrity, Respect and Collaboration

Knowledge:

• University degree in public policy, political science, environmental governance, international relations, communications, or related fields.
• Strong understanding of Romanian and EU environmental policy frameworks (biodiversity, freshwater, forests, climate, agrifood).
• Familiarity with advocacy planning, public affairs, and evidence‑based policy influencing

Experience:

• Minimum 7 years of relevant experience in policy advocacy/public affairs/strategic communications.
• Proven experience engaging authorities and policy processes at national/EU levels.
• Demonstrated leadership of multidisciplinary teams and cross‑functional
• Experience operating within complex, multicultural, matrixed environments.

Skills and Abilities:

• Strategic thinking, political acumen, and stakeholder management.
• Excellent analytical, writing, and presentation skills.
• Ability to design and deliver effective influencing strategies and initiatives.
• Strong planning, prioritisation, and performance management.
• Fluency in Romanian and English
• Proficiency in MS Office / Google Workspace.
• Advantage: media monitoring/analytics tools; basic design tools (e.g., Canva).

We offer

• The opportunity to make a difference – for Romania and WWF
• Challenging and fulfilling work in one of Europe’s most exciting eco-regions
• A friendly and highly professional working atmosphere in an international context
• Varying tasks and an independent work style
• A pleasant working atmosphere and a great learning environment

If you are interested in joining the global WWF team, email your application documents, including your CV and cover letter (in English) to [email protected]. Application deadline: 13.03.2026. Please understand that we can only reply to short-listed candidates.