Journal articles on the topic 'Climate changes - Rwanda'

With a population of close to 13 million, and an annual growth rate of 2.86 percent, Rwanda plans to position itself as a climate resilient, low carbon, low unemployment, reduced poverty country, with a strong services sector by 2050. Its projected increase in its urbanization rate from a current value of 18.4 percent to 35 percent by 2024 is driven by strong political will, significant investments in infrastructure, service provision, and human capital development. Rwanda’s secondary cities, identified as economic nodes of growth, are currently undergoing revision of their masterplans in consideration of climate change realities and the pressure on infrastructure and services due to rapid urbanization. Currently, cities in Rwanda do not yet have a system of public open spaces. Where available, such spaces are usually hardly accessible and need upgrading. To address this, the Ministry of Infrastructure, Rwanda Housing Authority, City of Kigali and six secondary cities have committed to deliver on public open space related activities and targets under the yearly performance contract ‘Imihigo’. The outcomes of their commitments support the climate-responsive revision of masterplans of the City of Kigali and six secondary cities. This paper presents public open space initiatives in Kigali and the results of the technical assessment of public open spaces and participatory planning and design workshop in Nyagatare, secondary city in Rwanda’s. It also discusses ongoing policy changes and initiatives that aim to promote public open spaces as crucial for urban public health.

This study quantifies the potential responses of 11 staple crop yields to projected changes in temperature and precipitation in Rwanda, using a cross sectional model based on yield data collected across more than 14,000 villages. We incorporated a relatively high spatial resolution dataset on crop productivity, considered a broad range of crops relevant to national agricultural production priorities, used environmental data developed specifically for Rwanda, and reported uncertainty both from our estimation model and due to uncertainty in future climate projections. We estimate that future climate change will have the largest impacts on potential productivity of maize, bush bean, and Irish potato. All three crops are likely to experience a reduction in potential yields of at least 10% under Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP) 4.5 and at least 15% under RCP 8.5 by 2050. Notably, these are important crops nationally, and three of the crops targeted by Rwanda’s Crop Intensification Program. We find that the most severe reductions in potential crop yields will occur in the drier eastern savannah and plateau regions, but that the impacts of climate change could be neutral or even positive in the highlands through mid-century. The refined spatial scale of our analysis allows us to identify potentially vulnerable regions where adaptation investments may need to be prioritized to support food security and climate resilience in Rwanda’s agricultural sector.

This paper had the objective of analyzing and characterizing the leachate from Nyanza landfill. The results revealed that the composition of the leachate is changeable according to the nature, the deposit time, and the climatic change. Leachate collected in the middle of landfill is categorized in the phase III of acid formation while the leachate collected from the exit is classified in the phase IV of methane formation and reasons for this variability are mainly waste nature, the deposit time, and the climate changes.

The changing climate poses a great challenge to many wetlands productivity worldwide. Rice production in wetlands is a major source of livelihood in developing countries such as Rwanda. This study aimed at determining the factors influencing adaptation methods when farmers perceive the changing climate at Bugarama Wetland Rice Scheme in Rwanda. A descriptive research design was used by this study, whereby quantitative and qualitative data was collected. The analysis was based on data collected from 300 selected farmers using systematic random sampling method. We employed descriptive statistics to assess how farmers perceive the effects of climate change and descriptively measured the new adaptation methods used by farmers in Bugarama to increase their yields. The study adopted Heckman two-step model to determine factors that influence adaptation choices, this analysis procedurally required farmers’ knowledge of perception that makes them respond to the effects of changes in climatic conditions by the use of new adaptation methods. The results deduced that level of education (p =0.019), extension access (p=0.001), market distance (p=0.002) and rice income (p < 0.001) had a probability of influencing farmers perceptions about climate change thus need to adapt. Based on the outcome model, results showed that extension access (p < 0.001), household size (p= 0.098), market distance (p= 0.047), rice income (p =0.032), farmers-to-farmers contact (p < 0.001) and effects of climate change on rice (p=0.038) had a greater probability of influencing farmers choice of adaptation method used to improve rice yields. To conclude, the study found that access to informational facilities and rice income, influenced farmers’ perceptions while extension access, rice income, market distance, farmers-to-farmers contact and effects of climate change on rice yield strongly had a probability of determining farmers’ choice of adaptation. This study recommends that the Rwandan government and local administrators need to develop a strategy that would allow farmers to access information facilities about new technology so as to adapt to the effects of climate change thus improve their rice yields.

In recent decades, population growth and economic development have greatly influenced the pattern of land use/land cover (LULC) in Rwanda. Nevertheless, LULC patterns and their underlying change mechanisms under future climate conditions are not well known. Therefore, it is particularly important to explore the direction of LULC transfer in the study area, identify the factors driving the transfer of different types of LULC and their changes, and simulate future LULC patterns under future climate conditions. Based on LULC analyses of Rwanda in 1990, 2000, 2010, and 2015, the LULC pattern of Rwanda in the next 30 years was simulated using an LULC transition matrix, random forest sampling, the Markov chain model, and the PLUS model. The results showed that LULC change in the study area primarily comprised a decrease in forest area and expansion of cropland area, accompanied by a small increase in grassland area and an annual increase in urban land area. Prior to 2000, the LULC in Rwanda was mainly converted from forest and grassland to cropland, with the ratio being 0.72:0.28. After 2010, the LULC was mainly converted from forest to grassland and cropland, with the ratio being 0.83:0.17. Changes in forests, grasslands, and cropland are driven by multiple factors, whereas changes in wetlands, water, urban land, and unused land are more likely to be driven by a single factor. The existing trend of LULC change will continue for the next 30 years, and the future LULC pattern will exhibit a trend in which cropland area will increase in the west and grassland area will decrease, whereas grassland area will increase in the east and cropland area will decrease.

Abstract. Air pollution is understudied in sub-Saharan Africa, resulting in a gap in the scientific understanding of emissions, atmospheric processes, and impacts of air pollutants in this region. The Rwanda Climate Observatory, a joint partnership between MIT and the government of Rwanda, has been measuring ambient concentrations of key long-lived greenhouse gases and the short-lived climate-forcing pollutants CO2, CO, CH4, black carbon (BC), and O3 with state-of-the-art instruments on the summit of Mt. Mugogo (1.586∘ S, 29.566∘ E; 2590 m above sea level) since May 2015. Rwanda is a small, mountainous, and densely populated country in equatorial East Africa, currently undergoing rapid development but still at less than 20 % urbanization. Black carbon concentrations during Rwanda's two dry seasons (December–January–February, DJF, and June–July–August, JJA), which coincide with the two regional biomass burning seasons, are higher at Mt. Mugogo than in major European cities with daily values (24 h) during the dry season of around 5 µg m−3 (daily average concentrations ranging from less than 0.1 to over 17 µg m−3 for the entire measurement period). BC baseline concentrations during biomass burning seasons are loosely correlated with fire radiative power data for the region acquired with a MODIS satellite instrument. The position and meteorology of Rwanda is such that the emissions transported from both the northern and southern African biomass burning seasons affect BC, CO, and O3 concentrations in Rwanda. Spectral aerosol absorption measured with a dual-spot Aethalometer varies seasonally due to changes in types of fuel burned and the direction of pollution transport to the site. Ozone concentrations peaked during Rwanda's dry seasons (daily measured maximum of 70 ppbv). The understanding and quantification of the percent contributions of regional and local (beyond large-scale biomass) emissions is essential to guide policy in the region. During the rainy seasons, local emitting activities (e.g., cooking, transportation, trash burning) remain steady, regional biomass burning is low, and transport distances are shorter as rainout of pollution occurs regularly. Thus, local pollution at Mugogo can be estimated during this time period and was found to account for up to 35 % of annual average BC measured. Our measurements indicate that air pollution is a current and growing problem in equatorial East Africa.

Climate change causes loss on lives and livelihoods while regular update strengthens resilience. This study aimed to analyze the rainfall variability impact on livelihoods in Northern Rwanda. The data on community losses due to rainfall variability were considered from 2013 to 2019. The GIS and SPSS helped the data analysis process. The results showed high mean monthly rainfall (119.345 and 90.05 mm) in 2013 and 2017, respectively. This caused landslide, flood, rainstorms, windstorms, lightning, and hailstorms occurrence, which killed/injured people, damaged houses and cropland, livestock loss, and destruction of infrastructures. The correlation analysis indicated a statistically significant p-value of 0.0151 lower than 0.05 and approved that rainfall variability negatively impacts livelihoods. This study can enable policymakers to better understand how changes in rainfall impact livelihoods and strategic measures to adopt for climate variability and climate change adaptation.

Under global climate change and pressure from human activities, soil erosion is becoming a major concern in the quest for regional sustainable development in the Kagera basin (KB). However, few studies in this region have comprehensively considered the impact of climate change and human influence on soil erosion, and the associated processes are unclear. Based on the premise of quantifying climate change, human influence, and soil erosion, this study undertook a neighborhood analysis as the theoretical support, for a grey relation analysis which was conducted to realize the qualitative assessment of the influence of climate change and human activities on soil erosion. The results show that 90.32% of the KB saw climate change as having a greater influence on soil erosion than human influence, with the remaining area 9.68% seeing human influence having a greater impact than climate change, mainly as a result of the effect of rangeland and farmland. The average soil erosion rate of the KB shows a very low level (10.54 t ha−1 yr−1), with rangeland and farmland being the main land use/land cover (LULC) types that see soil loss, followed by forest, wetland, and built-up areas. The climate change trends of the KB show the most dramatic changes in the northeast and southwest, gradually decreasing towards the line crossing from the Birunga National Park (Rwanda) to the Keza district (Tanzania). The human influence intensity (HII) shows a high level in the KB (21.93), where it is higher in the west and lower in the east of the basin.

Rivers in the Lake Victoria Basin support a multitude of ecosystem services, and the economies of the riparian countries (Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Rwanda, and Burundi) rely on their discharge, but projections of their future discharges under various climate change scenarios are not available. Here, we apply Vector Autoregressive Moving Average models with eXogenous variables (VARMAX) statistical models to project hydrological discharge for 23 river catchments for the 2015–2100 period, under three representative concentration pathways (RCPs), namely RCPs 2.6, 4.5, and 8.5. We show an intensification of future annual rainfall by 25% in the eastern and 5–10% in the western part of the basin. At higher emission scenarios, the October to December season receives more rainfall than the March to May season. Temperature projections show a substantial increase in the mean annual minimum temperature by 1.3–4.5 °C and warming in the colder season (June to September) by 1.7–2.9 °C under RCP 4.5 and 4.9 °C under RCP 8.5 by 2085. Variability in future river discharge ranges from 5–267%, increases with emission intensity, and is the highest in rivers in the southern and south eastern parts of the basin. The flow trajectories reveal no systematic trends but suggest marked inter-annual variation, primarily in the timing and magnitude of discharge peaks and lows. The projections imply the need for coordinated transboundary river management in the future.

Low-income producers and consumers of food in Africa are more vulnerable to climate change, owing to their comparatively limited ability to invest in more adapted institutions and technologies under increasing climatic risks. Therefore, the way we manage our food systems needs to be urgently changed if the goal is to achieve food security and sustainable development more quickly. This review paper analyzes the nexus “climate-smart agriculture-food systems-sustainable development” in order to draw sound ways that could allow rapid transformation of food systems in the context of climate change pressure. We followed an integrative review approach based on selected concrete example-experiences from ground-implemented projects across Africa (Ghana, Senegal, Mali, Burkina Faso, in West Africa, Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda, and Tanzania in East Africa). Mostly composed of examples from the Climate Change, Agriculture, and Food Security (CCAFS) Research Program of the CGIAR (former Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research) and its partners, these also included ground initiatives from non-CGIAR that could provide demonstrable conditions for a transformative agriculture and food systems. The lessons learnt from the ground implementation of climate-smart agriculture (CSA), in the African context, were instrumental to informing the actions areas of the food-system transformation framework suggested in this paper (reroute, de-risk, reduce, and realign). Selected CSA example-cases to inform these action areas included 24 initiatives across Africa, but with a focus on the following studies for an in-depth analysis: (1) the climate-smart village approach to generate knowledge on climate-smart agriculture (CSA) technologies and practices for their scaling, (2) the use of climate information services (CIS) to better manage climate variability and extremes, and (3) the science–policy interfacing to mainstream CSA into agricultural development policies and plans. The analysis of these examples showed that CSA can contribute driving a rapid change of food systems in Africa through: (1) the implementation of relevant climate-smart technologies and practices to reroute farming and rural livelihoods to new climate-resilient and low-emission trajectories; (2) the development and application of weather and climate information services (WCIS) that support de-risking of livelihoods, farms, and value chains in the face of increasing vagaries of weather and extreme events; (3) the use of climate-smart options that minimize waste of all the natural resources used for growing, processing, packaging, transporting, and marketing food, and therefore mitigating the carbon footprint attached to this food loss and waste; and (4) the realignment of policies and finance that facilitate action in the four proposed action areas through the identification of news ways to mobilize sustainable finance and create innovative financial mechanisms and delivery channels.

Elsewhere I have set forth a basic outline for charting histories of vegetation change through the use of paleoenvironmental data (Schoenbrun 1991). This essay builds on the previous one by laying out the contours of vegetation change and human agency in the Great Lakes region (Map 1) over the roughly three millennia after ca. 2000 BC.The history of the vegetation in eastern Africa's Great Lakes region brings into focus several important features of long-term environmental change—human action, climatic shift, and internal successional patterns. The primary sources for this history come from a variety of published palynological and limnological studies from Burundi, Rwanda, Uganda, and Zaire. Perhaps the most rewarding data for reconstructing climatic and vegetational change come from palynological studies. Pollen studies often reflect detailed changes in the constitution of plant communities, and their value for reconstructing the vegetational and climatic contexts for Holocene human history has provoked the development of a rigorous method for their analysis. Contemporary studies of plant community succession and human-vegetation relationships are a secondary source for the history of land clearance in the Great Lakes region. These works provide a means to determine the different imprints of human and climatic action on the paleoenvironmental record.In this study I combine the full range of paleoenvironmental evidence to reconstruct the form and pace of vegetation change. I focus on a part of eastern Africa famous for its great ecological diversity. One of the rewards of this endeavor is to demonstrate to paleoecologists, archaeologists, and historians alike the value of a truly interdisciplinary approach to environmental change.

Rwanda has experienced high temperature rising phenomena over the last decades and hence, highly vulnerable to climate change. This paper examined the spatial and temporal variations of daily maximum and minimum surface air temperature (Tmin and Tmax) and diurnal temperature range (DTR). It studied variables at monthly, seasonal and annual time-scales from 1961 to 2014. The study applied various statistical methods such as ordinary least-square fitting, Mann-Kendall, Sen’ slope and Sequential Mann-Kendall statistical test to the new reconstructed ENACTS dataset that cover the period from 1983 to 2014 while pre-1983s recorded data from 24 meteorological stations have been added to complete the lengthiness of ENACTS data. The January to February season did not show a significant trend at seasonal time-scales. The authors decided only to consider March-to-May, June-to-August and October-to-December seasons for further analyses. Topography impacts on temperature classified stations into three regions: region one (R1) (1,000–1,500 m), region two (R2) (1,500–2,000 m) and region three (R3) (≥2,000 m). With high confidence, the results indicate a significant positive trend in both Tmin and Tmax in all three regions during the whole study period. However, the magnitude rate of temperatures change is different in three regions and it varies in seasonal and annual scale. The spatial distributions of Tmax and Tmin represent a siginificant warming trend over the whole country notably since the early 1980s. Surprisingly, Tmin increased at a faster rate than Tmax in R3 (0.27 vs. 0.07°C/decade in March-to-May) and (0.29 vs. 0.04°C/decade in October-to-December), resulting in a significant decrease in the DTR. This is another confirmation of warming in Rwanda. The mutation test application exhibited most of the abrupt changes in the seasonal and annual Tmax and Tmin trends between 1984 and 1990. The present work mainly focus on the spatial and temporal variability of Tmin, Tmax and DTR in Rwanda and their relationship with elevation change, leaving a gap in other potential cause factors explored in the future.

Abstract Objectives Eliminating malnutrition is on many countries’ political agendas but knowledge of how enabling environments are created and used is needed. We assessed the drivers of change in stunting reduction among children <5 y of age in Rwanda and contributors to differential reduction over 10–25 y. Methods We conducted in-depth interviews on changes in nutrition with nutrition stakeholders at national (n = 32), district (n = 38), and community (n = 20) levels, and community focus group discussions (n = 40) in 10 purposefully selected districts in Rwanda's 5 provinces. In each province, we selected 1 district with decreased stunting and 1 where no change or an increase occurred (2010–2015). We also used regression decomposition analysis to investigate drivers of change in stunting with Demographic and Health Surveys (2005, 2010, and 2015) data. Results Respondents believed peace and security along with improved leadership and decentralization helped to create an enabling environment for change. Rwanda experienced increased political and institutional commitment to nutrition indicated by adoption of a multisectoral policy and reinforced with horizontal coordination platforms and plans at national and sub-national levels, but greater financial commitment is needed according to respondents. Vertical coordination across administrative levels improved through communication, staff working on nutrition at these levels, and relationships between nutrition actors. From respondent reports, health and agricultural programs and increased availability and use of health services helped improve nutrition; differences between study districts included climate change challenges, food insecurity, weak horizontal and vertical coherence, and weak implementation of coordination plans. Supporting this, giving birth in a health facility, attending ≥4 antenatal care visits, antenatal care quality, fertility, parental education, household wealth, and health insurance coverage drove stunting reduction from the regression decomposition analysis. Conclusions Leadership, commitment and horizontal and vertical coherence are important for creating enabling environments and providing programs and services that can lead to reduced malnutrition. Funding Sources Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Kingdom of Netherlands through SNV Netherlands Development Organization.

Abstract Background Malaria has continued to be a life-threatening disease among under-five children in sub-Saharan Africa. Recent data indicate rising cases in Rwanda after some years of decline. We aimed at estimating the spatial variations in malaria prevalence at a continuous spatial scale and to quantify locations where the prevalence exceeds the thresholds of 5% and 10% across the country. We also consider the effects of some socioeconomic and climate variables. Methods Using data from the 2014-2015 Rwanda Demographic and Health Survey, a geostatistical modeling technique based on stochastic partial differential equation approach was used to analyze the geospatial prevalence of malaria among under-five children in Rwanda. Bayesian inference was based on integrated nested Laplace approximation. Results The results demonstrate the uneven spatial variation of malaria prevalence with some districts including Kayonza and Kirehe from Eastern province; Huye and Nyanza from Southern province; and Nyamasheke and Rusizi from Western province having higher chances of recording prevalence exceeding 5%. Malaria prevalence was found to increase with rising temperature but decreases with increasing volume for rainfall. The findings also revealed a significant association between malaria and demographic factors including place of residence, mother’s educational level, and child’s age and sex. Conclusions Potential intervention programs that focus on individuals living in rural areas, lowest wealth quintile, and the locations with high risks should be reinforced. Variations in climatic factors particularly temperature and rainfall should be taken into account when formulating malaria intervention programs in Rwanda.

Diaspora This article looks at diaspora through the transformations of an established public service broadcaster, the BBC World Service, by considering some of the findings of the AHRC-funded Tuning In: Contact Zones at the BBC World Service, which is part of the Diasporas, Migration and Identities program. Tuning In has six themes, each of which focuses upon the role of the BBC WS: The Politics of Translation, Diasporic Nationhood, Religious Transnationalism, Sport across Diasporas, Migrating Music and Drama for Development. The World Service, which was until 2011 funded by the Foreign Office, was set up to cater for the British diaspora and had the specific remit of transmitting ideas about Britishness to its audiences overseas. Tuning In demonstrates interrelationships between the global and the local in the diasporic contact zone of the BBC World Service, which has provided a mediated home for the worldwide British diaspora since its inception in 1932. The local and the global have merged, elided, and separated at different times and in different spaces in the changing story of the BBC (Briggs). The BBC WS is both local and global with activities that present Britishness both at home and abroad. The service has, however, come a long way since its early days as the Empire Service. Audiences for the World Service’s 31 foreign language services, radio, television, and Internet facilities include substantive non-British/English-speaking constituencies, rendering it a contact zone for the exploration of ideas and political opportunities on a truly transnational scale. This heterogeneous body of exilic, refugee intellectuals, writers, and artists now operates alongside an ongoing expression of Britishness in all its diverse reconfiguration. This includes the residual voice of empire and its patriarchal paternalism, the embrace of more recent expressions of neoliberalism as well as traditional values of impartiality and objectivism and, in the case of the arts, elements of bohemianism and creative innovation. The World Service might have begun as a communication system for the British ex-pat diaspora, but its role has changed along with the changing relationship between Britain and its colonial past. In the terrain of sport, for example, cricket, the “game of empire,” has shifted from Britain to the Indian subcontinent (Guha) with the rise of “Twenty 20” and the Indian Premier League (IPL); summed up in Ashis Nandy’s claim that “cricket is an Indian game accidentally discovered by the English” (Nandy viii). English county cricket dominated the airways of the World Service well into the latter half of the twentieth century, but the audiences of the service have demanded a response to social and cultural change and the service has responded. Sport can thus be seen to have offered a democratic space in which new diasporic relations can be forged as well as one in which colonial and patriarchal values are maintained. The BBC WS today is part of a network through which non-British diasporic peoples can reconnect with their home countries via the service, as well as an online forum for debate across the globe. In many regions of the world, it continues to be the single most trusted source of information at times of crisis and disaster because of its traditions of impartiality and objectivity, even though (as noted in the article on Al-Jazeera in this special issue) this view is hotly contested. The principles of objectivity and impartiality are central to the BBC WS, which may seem paradoxical since it is funded by the Commonwealth and Foreign office, and its origins lie in empire and colonial discourse. Archive material researched by our project demonstrates the specifically ideological role of what was first called the Empire Service. The language of empire was deployed in this early programming, and there is an explicit expression of an ideological purpose (Hill). For example, at the Imperial Conference in 1930, the service was supported in terms of its political powers of “strengthening ties” between parts of the empire. This view comes from a speech by John Reith, the BBC’s first Director General, which was broadcast when the service opened. In this speech, broadcasting is identified as having come to involve a “connecting and co-ordinating link between the scattered parts of the British Empire” (Reith). Local British values are transmitted across the globe. Through the service, empire and nation are reinstated through the routine broadcasting of cyclical events, the importance of which Scannell and Cardiff describe as follows: Nothing so well illustrates the noiseless manner in which the BBC became perhaps the central agent of national culture as its cyclical role; the cyclical production year in year out, of an orderly, regular progression of festivities, rituals and celebrations—major and minor, civic and sacred—that mark the unfolding of the broadcast year. (278; italics in the original) State occasions and big moments, including those directly concerned with governance and affairs of state, and those which focused upon sport and religion, were a big part in these “noiseless” cycles, and became key elements in the making of Britishness across the globe. The BBC is “noiseless” because the timetable is assumed and taken for granted as not only what is but what should be. However, the BBC WS has been and has had to be responsive to major shifts in global and local—and, indeed, glocal—power geometries that have led to spatial transformations, notably in the reconfiguration of the service in the era of postcolonialism. Some of these massive changes have involved the large-scale movement of people and a concomitant rethinking of diaspora as a concept. Empire, like nation, operates as an “imagined community,” too big to be grasped by individuals (Anderson), as well as a material actuality. The dynamics of identification are rarely linear and there are inconsistencies and disruptions: even when the voice is officially that of empire, the practice of the World Service is much more diverse, nuanced, and dialogical. The BBC WS challenges boundaries through the connectivities of communication and through different ways of belonging and, similarly, through a problematisation of concepts like attachment and detachment; this is most notable in the way in which programming has adapted to new diasporic audiences and in the reworkings of spatiality in the shift from empire to diversity via multiculturalism. There are tensions between diaspora and multiculturalism that are apparent in a discussion of broadcasting and communication networks. Diaspora has been distinguished by mobility and hybridity (Clifford, Hall, Bhaba, Gilroy) and it has been argued that the adjectival use of diasporic offers more opportunity for fluidity and transformation (Clifford). The concept of diaspora, as it has been used to explain the fluidity and mobility of diasporic identifications, can challenge more stabilised, “classic” understandings of diaspora (Chivallon). A hybrid version of diaspora might sit uneasily with a strong sense of belonging and with the idea that the broadcast media offer a multicultural space in which each voice can be heard and a wide range of cultures are present. Tuning In engaged with ways of rethinking the BBC’s relationship to diaspora in the twenty-first century in a number of ways: for example, in the intersection of discursive regimes of representation; in the status of public service broadcasting; vis-à-vis the consequences of diverse diasporic audiences; through the role of cultural intermediaries such as journalists and writers; and via global economic and political materialities (Gillespie, Webb and Baumann). Tuning In thus provided a multi-themed and methodologically diverse exploration of how the BBC WS is itself a series of spaces which are constitutive of the transformation of diasporic identifications. Exploring the part played by the BBC WS in changing and continuing social flows and networks involves, first, reconfiguring what is understood by transnationalism, diaspora, and postcolonial relationalities: in particular, attending to how these transform as well as sometimes reinstate colonial and patriarchal discourses and practices, thus bringing together different dimensions of the local and the global. Tuning In ranges across different fields, embracing cultural, social, and political areas of experience as represented in broadcasting coverage. These fields illustrate the educative role of the BBC and the World Service that is also linked to its particular version of impartiality; just as The Archers was set up to provide information and guidance through a narrative of everyday life to rural communities and farmers after the Second World War, so the Afghan version plays an “edutainment” role (Skuse) where entertainment also serves an educational, public service information role. Indeed, the use of soap opera genre such as The Archers as a vehicle for humanitarian and health information has been very successful over the past decade, with the “edutainment” genre becoming a feature of the World Service’s broadcasting in places such as Rwanda, Somalia, Nigeria, India, Nepal, Burma, Afghanistan, and Cambodia. In a genre that has been promoted by the World Service Trust, the charitable arm of the BBC WS uses drama formats to build transnational production relationships with media professionals and to strengthen creative capacities to undertake behaviour change through communication work. Such programming, which is in the tradition of the BBC WS, draws upon the service’s expertise and exhibits both an ideological commitment to progressive social intervention and a paternalist approach drawing upon colonialist legacies. Nowadays, however, the BBC WS can be considered a diasporic contact zone, providing sites of transnational intra-diasporic contact as well as cross-cultural encounters, spaces for cross-diasporic creativity and representation, and a forum for cross-cultural dialogue and potentially cosmopolitan translations (Pratt, Clifford). These activities are, however, still marked by historically forged asymmetric power relations, notably of colonialism, imperialism, and globalisation, as well as still being dominated by hegemonic masculinity in many parts of the service, which thus represent sites of contestation, conflict, and transgression. Conversely, diasporic identities are themselves co-shaped by media representations (Sreberny). The diasporic contact zone is a relational space in which diasporic identities are made and remade and contested. Tuning In employed a diverse range of methods to analyse the part played by the BBC WS in changing and continuing social and cultural flows, networks, and reconfigurations of transnationalisms and diaspora, as well as reinstating colonial, patriarchal practices. The research deconstructed some assumptions and conditions of class-based elitism, colonialism, and patriarchy through a range of strategies. Texts are, of course, central to this work, with the BBC Archives at Caversham (near Reading) representing the starting point for many researchers. The archive is a rich source of material for researchers which carries a vast range of data including fragile memos written on scraps of paper: a very local source of global communications. Other textual material occupies the less locatable cyberspace, for example in the case of Have Your Say exchanges on the Web. People also featured in the project, through the media, in cyberspace, and physical encounters, all of which demonstrate the diverse modes of connection that have been established. Researchers worked with the BBC WS in a variety of ways, not only through interviews and ethnographic approaches, such as participant observation and witness seminars, but also through exchanges between the service, its practitioners, and the researchers (for example, through broadcasts where the project provided the content and the ideas and researchers have been part of programs that have gone out on the BBC WS (Goldblatt, Webb), bringing together people who work for the BBC and Tuning In researchers). On this point, it should be remembered that Bush House is, itself, a diasporic space which, from its geographical location in the Strand in London, has brought together diasporic people from around the globe to establish international communication networks, and has thus become the focus and locus of some of our research. What we have understood by the term “diasporic space” in this context includes both the materialities of architecture and cyberspace which is the site of digital diasporas (Anderssen) and, indeed, the virtual exchanges featured on “Have Your Say,” the online feedback site (Tuning In). Living the Glocal The BBC WS offers a mode of communication and a series of networks that are spatially located both in the UK, through the material presence of Bush House, and abroad, through the diasporic communities constituting contemporary audiences. The service may have been set up to provide news and entertainment for the British diaspora abroad, but the transformation of the UK into a multi-ethnic society “at home,” alongside its commitment to, and the servicing of, no less than 32 countries abroad, demonstrates a new mission and a new balance of power. Different diasporic communities, such as multi-ethnic Londoners, and local and British Muslims in the north of England, demonstrate the dynamics and ambivalences of what is meant by “diaspora” today. For example, the BBC and the WS play an ambiguous role in the lives of UK Muslim communities with Pakistani connections, where consumers of the international news can feel that the BBC is complicit in the conflation of Muslims with terrorists. Engaging Diaspora Audiences demonstrated the diversity of audience reception in a climate of marginalisation, often bordering on moral panic, and showed how diasporic audiences often use Al-Jazeera or Pakistani and Urdu channels, which are seen to take up more sympathetic political positions. It seems, however, that more egalitarian conversations are becoming possible through the channels of the WS. The participation of local people in the BBC WS global project is seen, for example, as in the popular “Witness Seminars” that have both a current focus and one that is projected into the future, as in the case of the “2012 Generation” (that is, the young people who come of age in 2012, the year of the London Olympics). The Witness Seminars demonstrate the recuperation of past political and social events such as “Bangladesh in 1971” (Tuning In), “The Cold War seminar” (Tuning In) and “Diasporic Nationhood” (the cultural movements reiterated and recovered in the “Literary Lives” project (Gillespie, Baumann and Zinik). Indeed, the WS’s current focus on the “2012 Generation,” including an event in which 27 young people (each of whom speaks one of the WS languages) were invited to an open day at Bush House in 2009, vividly illustrates how things have changed. Whereas in 1948 (the last occasion when the Olympic Games were held in London), the world came to London, it is arguable that, in 2012, in contemporary multi-ethnic Britain, the world is already here (Webb). This enterprise has the advantage of giving voice to the present rather than filtering the present through the legacies of colonialism that remain a problem for the Witness Seminars more generally. The democratising possibilities of sport, as well as the restrictions of its globalising elements, are well represented by Tuning In (Woodward). Sport has, of course become more globalised, especially through the development of Internet and satellite technologies (Giulianotti) but it retains powerful local affiliations and identifications. At all levels and in diverse places, there are strong attachments to local and national teams that are constitutive of communities, including diasporic and multi-ethnic communities. Sport is both typical and distinctive of the BBC World Service; something that is part of a wider picture but also an area of experience with a life of its own. Our “Sport across Diasporas” project has thus explored some of the routes the World Service has travelled in its engagement with sport in order to provide some understanding of the legacy of empire and patriarchy, as well as engaging with the multiplicities of change in the reconstruction of Britishness. Here, it is important to recognise that what began as “BBC Sport” evolved into “World Service Sport.” Coverage of the world’s biggest sporting events was established through the 1930s to the 1960s in the development of the BBC WS. However, it is not only the global dimensions of sporting events that have been assumed; so too are national identifications. There is no question that the superiority of British/English sport is naturalised through its dominance of the BBC WS airways, but the possibilities of reinterpretation and re-accommodation have also been made possible. There has, indeed, been a changing place of sport in the BBC WS, which can only be understood with reference to wider changes in the relationship between broadcasting and sport, and demonstrates the powerful synchronies between social, political, technological, economic, and cultural factors, notably those that make up the media–sport–commerce nexus that drives so much of the trajectory of contemporary sport. Diasporic audiences shape the schedule as much as what is broadcast. There is no single voice of the BBC in sport. The BBC archive demonstrates a variety of narratives through the development and transformation of the World Service’s sports broadcasting. There are, however, silences: notably those involving women. Sport is still a patriarchal field. However, the imperial genealogies of sport are inextricably entwined with the social, political, and cultural changes taking place in the wider world. There is no detectable linear narrative but rather a series of tensions and contradictions that are reflected and reconfigured in the texts in which deliberations are made. In sport broadcasting, the relationship of the BBC WS with its listeners is, in many instances, genuinely dialogic: for example, through “Have Your Say” websites and internet forums, and some of the actors in these dialogic exchanges are the broadcasters themselves. The history of the BBC and the World Service is one which manifests a degree of autonomy and some spontaneity on the part of journalists and broadcasters. For example, in the case of the BBC WS African sports program, Fast Track (2009), many of the broadcasters interviewed report being able to cover material not technically within their brief; news journalists are able to engage with sporting events and sports journalists have covered social and political news (Woodward). Sometimes this is a matter of taking the initiative or simply of being in the right place at the right time, although this affords an agency to journalists which is increasingly unlikely in the twenty-first century. The Politics of Translation: Words and Music The World Service has played a key role as a cultural broker in the political arena through what could be construed as “educational broadcasting” via the wider terrain of the arts: for example, literature, drama, poetry, and music. Over the years, Bush House has been a home-from-home for poets: internationalists, translators from classical and modern languages, and bohemians; a constituency that, for all its cosmopolitanism, was predominantly white and male in the early days. For example, in the 1930s and 1940s, Louis MacNeice was commissioning editor and surrounded by a friendship network of salaried poets, such as W. H. Auden, Dylan Thomas, C. Day Lewis, and Stephen Spender, who wrote and performed their work for the WS. The foreign language departments of the BBC WS, meanwhile, hired émigrés and exiles from their countries’ educated elites to do similar work. The biannual, book-format journal Modern Poetry in Translation (MPT), which was founded in 1965 by Daniel Weissbort and Ted Hughes, included a dedication in Weissbort’s final issue (MPT 22, 2003) to “Poets at Bush House.” This volume amounts to a celebration of the BBC WS and its creative culture, which extended beyond the confines of broadcasting spaces. The reminiscences in “Poets at Bush House” suggest an institutional culture of informal connections and a fluidity of local exchanges that is resonant of the fluidity of the flows and networks of diaspora (Cheesman). Music, too, has distinctive characteristics that mark out this terrain on the broadcast schedule and in the culture of the BBC WS. Music is differentiated from language-centred genres, making it a particularly powerful medium of cross-cultural exchange. Music is portable and yet is marked by a cultural rootedness that may impede translation and interpretation. Music also carries ambiguities as a marker of status across borders, and it combines aesthetic intensity and diffuseness. The Migrating Music project demonstrated BBC WS mediation of music and identity flows (Toynbee). In the production and scheduling notes, issues of migration and diaspora are often addressed directly in the programming of music, while the movement of peoples is a leitmotif in all programs in which music is played and discussed. Music genres are mobile, diasporic, and can be constitutive of Paul Gilroy’s “Black Atlantic” (Gilroy), which foregrounds the itinerary of West African music to the Caribbean via the Middle Passage, cross-fertilising with European traditions in the Americas to produce blues and other hybrid forms, and the journey of these forms to Europe. The Migrating Music project focused upon the role of the BBC WS as narrator of the Black Atlantic story and of South Asian cross-over music, from bhangra to filmi, which can be situated among the South Asian diaspora in east and south Africa as well as the Caribbean where they now interact with reggae, calypso, Rapso, and Popso. The transversal flows of music and lyrics encompasses the lived experience of the different diasporas that are accommodated in the BBC WS schedules: for example, they keep alive the connection between the Irish “at home” and in the diaspora through programs featuring traditional music, further demonstrating the interconnections between local and global attachments as well as points of disconnection and contradiction. Textual analysis—including discourse analysis of presenters’ speech, program trailers and dialogue and the BBC’s own construction of “world music”—has revealed that the BBC WS itself performs a constitutive role in keeping alive these traditions. Music, too, has a range of emotional affects which are manifest in the semiotic analyses that have been conducted of recordings and performances. Further, the creative personnel who are involved in music programming, including musicians, play their own role in this ongoing process of musical migration. Once again, the networks of people involved as practitioners become central to the processes and systems through which diasporic audiences are re-produced and engaged. Conclusion The BBC WS can claim to be a global and local cultural intermediary not only because the service was set up to engage with the British diaspora in an international context but because the service, today, is demonstrably a voice that is continually negotiating multi-ethnic audiences both in the UK and across the world. At best, the World Service is a dynamic facilitator of conversations within and across diasporas: ideas are relocated, translated, and travel in different directions. The “local” of a British broadcasting service, established to promote British values across the globe, has been transformed, both through its engagements with an increasingly diverse set of diasporic audiences and through the transformations in how diasporas themselves self-define and operate. On the BBC WS, demographic, social, and cultural changes mean that the global is now to be found in the local of the UK and any simplistic separation of local and global is no longer tenable. The educative role once adopted by the BBC, and then the World Service, nevertheless still persists in other contexts (“from Ambridge to Afghanistan”), and clearly the WS still treads a dangerous path between the paternalism and patriarchy of its colonial past and its responsiveness to change. 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