South-east Asia is home to exceptional biodiversity, but threats to vertebrate species are disproportionately high in this region. The IUCN Species Survival Commission Asian Species Action Partnership aims to avert species extinctions. Strengthening individual and organizational capacity is key to achieving long-term, sustainable conservation impact, and is a core strategic intervention for the Partnership. To look at the needs and opportunities for developing capacity for species conservation in South-east Asia, we undertook a needs assessment with organizations implementing species conservation within this region. We conducted a review of available training opportunities, mapping them against a list of identified competences needed for species conservation to determine gaps in current training. Our assessments revealed an imbalance in the focus of training opportunities vs the actual competences needed for effective species conservation, and that training opportunities within South-east Asia are limited in number and highly competitive. These findings corroborate other similar reviews, particularly on capacity gaps in the Global South. We discuss the implications of our review and use the findings to generate recommendations.

By the outbreak of the Second World War in Britain, critics had spent several decades negotiating the supposed distinctions between highbrow and lowbrow culture, as recent scholarship has shown. What has received comparatively little attention is how the demands of wartime living changed the stakes of the debate. This article addresses this lacuna, exploring how war invited a reassessment of the relative merits of art and popular music. Perhaps the most iconic British singer of the period, Vera Lynn provides a case study. Focusing on her first film vehicle, We'll Meet Again (1942), I explore how Lynn's character mediated the highbrow/lowbrow conflict – for example, by presenting popular music as a site of community, while disparaging art music for its minority appeal. In so doing, I argue, the film not only promoted Lynn's star persona, but also intervened in a broader debate about the value of entertainment for a nation at war.

While biographical studies of British composers' experiences in the Second World War abound, little attention has been paid to how the demands of ‘total’ war impacted on music's ideological status. This article sheds new light on how composers and critics negotiated the problematic relationship between art music and politics in this period. John Ireland's Epic March – a BBC commission that caused the composer considerable anxiety – provides a case study. Drawing first on the correspondence charting the lengthy genesis of the work, and then on the work's critical reception, I consider how Ireland and his audiences sought to reconcile the conflicting political and aesthetic demands of this commission. With its conventional musical style, Epic March offers an example of a ‘middlebrow’ attempt to bridge the gap between art and politics.