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There is increasing emphasis on the need for effective ways of sharing knowledge to enhance environmental management and sustainability. Knowledge exchange (KE) are processes that generate, share and/or use knowledge through various methods appropriate to the context, purpose, and participants involved. KE includes concepts such as sharing, generation, coproduction, comanagement, and brokerage of knowledge. This paper elicits the expert knowledge of academics involved in research and practice of KE from different disciplines and backgrounds to review research themes, identify gaps and questions, and develop a research agenda for furthering understanding about KE. Results include 80 research questions prefaced by a review of research themes. Key conclusions are: (1) there is a diverse range of questions relating to KE that require attention; (2) there is a particular need for research on understanding the process of KE and how KE can be evaluated; and (3) given the strong interdependency of research questions, an integrated approach to understanding KE is required. To improve understanding of KE, action research methodologies and embedding evaluation as a normal part of KE research and practice need to be encouraged. This will foster more adaptive approaches to learning about KE and enhance effectiveness of environmental management.

A review essay on books by (1) Ben Wisner, Camilla Toulmin, & Rutendo Chitiga [Eds] Towards a New Map of Africa (London: Earthscan, 2005); (2) Kwadwo Konadu-Agyemang & Kwamina Panford, [Eds] Africa's Development in the Twenty-First Century: Pertinent Socioeconomic and Development Issues (Aldershot & Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006); & (3) William G. Moseley [Ed], Taking Sides: Clashing Views on African Issues (New York, NY: McGraw-Hill, 2007).

This thesis explores how people’s knowledge about sustainability affects participation in combined conservation and development initiatives. It focuses principally on two case studies that embody these dual objectives: the ‘conservancy programme’ in Namibia and the Alto Bermejo Project in Argentina. The concept of sustainability – of living in a way that meets both current and future needs – has led, on a global scale, to a re-casting of the relationship between conservation and development as one of necessary interdependence. Such is the credibility invested in the concept of sustainability that it is found underpinning policy and intervention in countries as distinct as Namibia and Argentina. These observations set up the two central questions of the thesis. First, what types of participation characterise decision-making processes within these two contexts? Second, how is having knowledge on sustainability one (though not the only) causal determinant of who participates, in what activities and on what basis? These questions pave the way for analysis of the types of participation found in two Namibian conservancies and specific components of the Alto Bermejo Project in Argentina. A key belief shaping policy and intervention in both contexts is that wider local involvement is a precondition of sustainable natural resource use. Consequently, strong efforts are made in both places to attempt to ensure that local people are key decision-makers. However, talk of local-level, grassroots participation in the Namibian or Argentine context, whilst by no means wholly misplaced, can obscure the high participation levels of NGO, government and specific private-sector actors. This is because both initiatives depend for the achievement of their objectives on a process of knowledge transfer from implementers to beneficiaries. Much of the knowledge deemed necessary for the realisation of these objectives lies with government, NGO and specific private sector actors. Having this knowledge, therefore, renders their participation indispensable. Indeed, the very access of these actors to the resources on which intervention depends is partly a function of the credibility invested in their knowledge. Access to resources is also a means through which the credibility of such knowledge is reinforced. This dynamic I call ‘circularity in intervention’. ‘Circularity in intervention’ entails a variety of advantages and disadvantages relative to context and perspective, which this thesis neither condemns nor condones. It does, nonetheless, seek to clarify one important point. Our account of participation in the Namibian or Argentine examples is incomplete without looking at how having or not having knowledge about sustainability affects participation.

Climate change has already resulted in climate-related extreme events of greater frequency and/or intensity. This, along with long-term changes in average conditions (whether in temperature or rainfall), is likely to continue to have a major impact on livelihoods. Developing countries will be especially affected by such events - and more specifically, the poor people in developing countries - because of their geographical exposure and their greater reliance on climate-sensitive sectors such as agriculture. Social protection offers a wide range of instruments (e.g. cash transfers, insurance products, pension schemes and employment guarantee schemes) that can be used to support households that are particularly vulnerable to both the ongoing and acute impacts of climate changes. Although the evidence base showing how these measures can help those affected prevent and cope with climate challenges is still limited, this paper aims to provide a condensed review of the current knowledge and evidence about the role of social protection in reducing the impact of climate change on the poorest populations and provides a series of recommendations for both social protection and climate change practitioners and for strengthening the evidence base.

A sense of disappointment, within some academic circles and the popular press more widely, has arisen from the perceived lack of progress in the African context towards standard developmental goals such as longer life expectancy, greater opportunities for economic security and stability, or a more equitable distribution of profits made from the exploitation and sale of Africa's natural resources. Zeleza in particular has issued a clarion call for African scholars to bring about 'the \"Africanization\" of the existing disciplines and interdisciplines and any new knowledge formations that may emerge'.5 Zeleza's bent has itself provoked criticism, notably in the form of a terse exchange with another Africanist heavyweight, Achille Mbembe.6 Mbembe worries that worthwhile critiques of African Studies in the Occident can all too easily spill over into 'an extreme fetishizing of geographical identities'.\\n Unlike New Map or Africa's Development, the incorporation of a high proportion of African contributors does not therefore appear to have been an overriding feature of the selection criteria.

As part of our tenth anniversary celebrations in April, we launched a short story competition in association with seriously... vodka. This is the winning entry

The ever increasing microbial resistome means there is an urgent need for new antibiotics. Metagenomics is an underexploited tool in the field of drug discovery. In this study we aimed to produce a new updated assay for the discovery of biosynthetic gene clusters encoding bioactive secondary metabolites. PCR assays targeting the polyketide synthases (PKS) and non-ribosomal peptide synthetases (NRPS) were developed. A range of European soils were tested for their biosynthetic potential using clone libraries developed from metagenomic DNA. Results revealed a surprising number of NRPS and PKS clones with similarity to rare Actinomycetes. Many of the clones tested were phylogenetically divergent suggesting they were fragments from novel NRPS and PKS gene clusters. Soils did not appear to cluster by location but did represent NRPS and PKS clones of diverse taxonomic origin. Fosmid libraries were constructed from Cuban and Antarctic soil samples; 17 fosmids were positive for NRPS domains suggesting a hit rate of less than 1 in 10 genomes. NRPS hits had low similarities to both rare Actinobacteria and Proteobacteria; they also clustered with known antibiotic producers suggesting they may encode for pathways producing novel bioactive compounds. In conclusion we designed an assay capable of detecting divergent NRPS and PKS gene clusters from the rare biosphere; when tested on soil samples results suggest the majority of NRPS and PKS pathways and hence bioactive metabolites are yet to be discovered.