July event brings together LWEC's knowledge exchange champions

Guidelines and a resources bank to grow from LWEC's good practice sharing event.

Living With Environmental Change is now committed to producing guidelines and developing a resource bank of people and practices to support knowledge sharing across its portfolio of activities.

The commitments follow a Natural Environment Research Council led one day good practice sharing event which saw research programme managers, knowledge exchange co-ordinators, policy advisors and others in similar roles discuss issues arising from their experience.

Participants came up with strong suggestions as to the sort of things they hoped they could progress through LWEC such as a regular gathering and development of this particular interest community.

They also engaged in detailed discussion of some of the more difficult issues such as how to evaluate the impact that research activities might achieve against original intentions.

The LWEC directorate intends to find a way  to use this website to share good practice and to challenge what “good” is so that we might learn to improve. We might even be tempted to follow the lead of the Rural Economy and Land Use Programme which in November is holding an X factor type awards ceremony for the best knowledge exchange activities voted for by programme stakeholders. The UK’s well known talent scout, Simon Cowell, has not yet contacted us but watch this space!

John Rea from the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affaris says 'Defra’s Evidence Plans outline the rationale for the policy activity and summarise the past, present and future evidence work that can be used to inform policy development.'

Presentations and other outputs from July's knowledge exchange good practice sharing event event can be downloaded from this page as they become available.

Defra's Evidence Plans are available at: http://www.defra.gov.uk/corporate/evidence/science/strategy-evidence-plans