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This book explores the changing dynamics and challenges behind the rapid expanse of Africa's urban population. Africa's urban age is underway. With the world's fastest growing urban population, the continent is rapidly transforming from one that is largely rural, to one that is largely urban. Often facing limited budgets, those tasked with managing African cities require empirical evidence on the nature of demands for infrastructure, escalating environmental hazards, and ever-expanding informal settlements. Drawing on the work of the African Urban Research Initiative, this book brings together contributions from local researchers investigating key themes and challenges within their own contexts. An important example of urban knowledge coproduction, the book demonstrates the regional diversity that can be seen as the main feature of African urbanism, with even well-accepted concepts such as informality manifesting in markedly different ways from place to place. Providing an important nuanced perspective on the heterogeneity of African cities and the challenges they face, this book will be an important resource for researchers across development studies, African studies, and urban studies.

Regional economies are continuously evolving shifting from more traditional manufacturing toward more service-oriented production systems. Despite the increasing relevance of services, however, the analysis of innovation at the regional aggregate level has mainly focused on manufacturing, gathering the attention on the role of R&D expenditure as input in the production process and, in some cases, accounting for research-based knowledge externalities. In this paper the role of Knowledge Intensive Business Services is studied and their contribution to the regional aggregate innovation is evaluated. The aim is twofold. First is to provide insights on the role covered by KIBS as a second knowledge infrastructure. Second is to examine the extent to which KIBS operate as bridges between the general purpose analytical knowledge produced by scientific universities and more specific requirement of innovative firms. A role commonly acknowledged to KIBS is in fact that of knowledge transferors. If on the one side it is however clear to whom they transfer knowledge, their client firms, on the other it is not as clear from whom the knowledge is originally transferred. For this reason a major attention in this work is dedicated to scientific universities considered as a primary source of knowledge. Being this knowledge analytical and highly codified, it probably can be more easily accessed by nearby located firms having higher opportunities of research collaboration and less easily by firms located in different regions. It is argued that KIBS, in transferring knowledge from universities to firms, are therefore specially important in the latter case. To test hese hypothesis a knowledge production function is estimated for a sample of 200 EU NUTS II regions including also information of university research and KIBS concentration. Parameters are estimated using the heteroschedasticity-consistent G2SLS estimator for spatial models and the evidence suggests that the contribution of KIBS to regional innovation is considerable. In fact accounting for the knowledge embedded in business services can considerably contribute to explain the cross-regional variation in innovative activities. Furthermore it is find that the KIBS contribution is more sizeable in regions in which there are not scientific universities. The highlighted results have important policy implications asking to rethink to how much effective an R&D-centered innovation strategy could be, at least in some regions.

In the last couple of years, the concept of knowledge co-production has become more prominent. However, the meaning of the term and its relationship with the evidence-based policy (EBP) remains ambiguous. The main objectives of the review were to describe how the co-production of knowledge has been defined, the roles that individual actors can play in the process and the relationship between knowledge co-production and the evidence-based policy approach. The author asserted that the knowledge co-production was treated by the researchers both as a participatory research method and as an institutional solution for better policy implementation.

"This book demonstrates how active and meaningful collaboration between researchers and local stakeholders and indigenous communities can lead to the co-production of knowledge and the empowerment of communities. Focusing on the Asia-Pacific region, this interdisciplinary volume looks at local and indigenous relations to the landscape, showing how applied scholarship and collaborative research can work to empower indigenous and descendant communities. With cases ranging across Indonesia, Thailand, Taiwan, the Philippines, Cambodia, Pohnpei, Guam, and Easter Island, this book demonstrates the many ways in which co-production of knowledge is reconnecting local and indigenous relations to the landscape, and diversifying the philosophy of human-land relations. In so doing, the book is enriching the knowledge of landscape, and changing the landscape of knowledge. This important contribution to our understanding of knowledge production will be of interest to readers across Anthropology, Archaeology, Development, Geography, Heritage Studies, Indigenous Studies, and Policy Studies"--

Climate change is taken as a new site of scientific inquiry across the disciplines against the backdrop of the global discourses of the crisis human society confronts today. Our inability to predict and forecast the future and the problems of climate change led to a theoretical vacuum and thereby burden on the scientific communities. Climate change-induced uncertainties manifested in the manifold and their implications on human society, livelihood and ecosystem have increasingly become the objects of analysis for devising empirical tools for field enquiry. It challenges the specificities while looking at the events of uncertainties in context. The new set of evidence on climate change has also redefined the role of the scientific community. This paper discusses climate-related events in the lives of people and the changes in the ecosystem and explores how such factors became an object of scientific inquiry. With the ideas of political ecology, the domain of scientific practices is transformed into an arena of co-production of knowledge in which place, social context and agencies become central. This study explores (1) how the scientific community adapted to outline an interdisciplinary research programme to systematically investigate and register climate-change-affected areas and (2) how the local people in Ladakh Himalaya have participated and reflected on the changing pattern of livelihood and ecosystem through this research enquiry. It has further complicated the analysis on nature-culture dialectics to adapt a robust scientific method to signify the importance of mutual learning and knowledge co-production in climate science.

Supporting the development of trusted and usable science remains a key challenge in contested spaces. This paper evaluates a collaborative research agreement between the North Slope Borough of Alaska and Shell Exploration and Production Company—an agreement that was designed to improve collection of information and management of issues associated with the potential impacts of oil and gas development in the Arctic. The evaluation is based on six categories of knowledge co-production indicators: external factors, inputs, processes, outputs, outcomes, and impacts. Two sources of data were used to assess the indicators: interviews with steering committee members and external science managers (n = 16) and a review of steering committee minutes. Interpretation of the output and outcome indicators suggests that the Baseline Studies Program supported a broad range of research, though there were differences in how groups perceived the relevance and legitimacy of project outcomes. Several input, process, and external variables enabled the co-production of trusted science in an emergent boundary organization and contested space; these variables included governance arrangements, leveraged capacities, and the inclusion of traditional knowledge. Challenges to knowledge co-production on the North Slope include logistics, differences in cultures and decision contexts, and balancing trade-offs among perceived credibility, legitimacy, and relevance. Reinforced lessons learned included providing time to foster trust, developing adaptive governance approaches, and building capacity among scientists to translate community concerns into research questions. ; La nécessité d'appuyer la production de données scientifiques fiables et utilisables demeure un défi important dans les espaces contestés. Le présent article évalue une entente de collaboration de recherche entre la municipalité de North Slope, en Alaska, et la Shell Exploration and Production Company, entente destinée à améliorer la collecte de renseignements et la gestion des enjeux liés aux incidences éventuelles de l'exploitation pétrolière et gazière dans l'Arctique. L'évaluation est fondée sur six catégories d'indicateurs de coproduction des connaissances : facteurs externes, intrants, processus, extrants, résultats et incidences. Deux sources de données ont été employées pour évaluer les indicateurs : des entrevues avec les membres du comité directeur et des gestionnaires scientifiques externes (n = 16), et l'examen des procès-verbaux du comité directeur. L'interprétation des indicateurs d'extrants et de résultats suggère que le programme d'études de base a appuyé un large éventail de recherches, mais qu'il y avait des différences dans la façon dont les groupes percevaient la pertinence et la légitimité des résultats du projet. Plusieurs variables d'intrants, de processus et de facteurs externes ont permis la coproduction de données scientifiques fiables dans une organisation frontalière émergente et un espace contesté. Ces variables comprenaient les mécanismes de gouvernance, les capacités utilisées et l'inclusion des connaissances traditionnelles. Parmi les défis propres à la coproduction de connaissances à North Slope, notons des défis de logistique, de différences sur les plans de la culture et des contextes décisionnels, ainsi que l'équilibre des compromis entre les perceptions en matière de crédibilité, de légitimité et de pertinence. Quant aux leçons apprises, notons la nécessité d'accorder du temps pour favoriser la confiance, d'élaborer des méthodes de gouvernance adaptatives et de renforcer les capacités chez les scientifiques pour traduire les préoccupations communautaires en questions de recherche.