The WEF Nexus: Water - Energy - Food

“Due to the flexibility of the nexus concept, its application in empirical studies has best served to expand, rather than direct, study scope. Insights tend to be high-level, while identified actionable management and policy proscriptions are not broadly applicable. We found no clear methodology uniting nexus studies, and a lack of improvement of resource management and governance outcomes.” p.5.

"The great breadth of the WEF nexus provides an intellectual home for an expansive array of research objectives, methods, and conclusions. This has produced some valuable scholarship but simultaneously limits overall insights and lessons that can be drawn from empirical nexus work. Our review identified some high-level insights and commonalities related to the definition of the WEF nexus (centring on linkages between WEF systems), the motivations for empirical nexus study, the importance of economics and governance in the nexus and nexus analyses, and the role of social and physical factors in constructing nexus interdependencies. Beyond these, however, the findings and specific technical and policy solutions proposed in the reviewed studies are difficult to synthesize as they lack coherence." p.14.

Galaitsi, S., Veysey, J. and Huber-Lee, A. (2018). Where is the added value? A review of the water-energy-food nexus literature. SEI working paper. Stockholm Environment Institute, Stockholm.

"In this light, the ‘nexus’ has gained significant interest as a potentially effective approach for considering the interdependencies between WEF security and climate change at various scales. Put simply, a nexus is defined as one or more connections linking two or more things. The term is widely used (e.g. the environment — development nexus, the population —migration nexus, etc.)." p.445-446.

"Analytical eclecticism* is characterised by the following: (i) a pragmatic ethos that targets the world of policy and practice; (ii) interest in wide-scoped problems (in contrast to narrowly defined theoretical dilemmas) that ‘incorporate more of the complexity and messiness of particular real-world situations’, and (iii) the aim of providing complex causal stories that account for multiple causal mechanisms predominantly explored in isolation within particular research traditions (Sil and Katzenstein 2010, 412). Notwithstanding the potential of transdisciplinary approaches and analytical eclecticism, some still argue that more research and criticaltheoretical engagement is required to advance the nexus (Harris and Lyon 2014)" p. 452.

Leck, H, Conway, D, Bradshaw, M, and Rees, J (2015), Tracing the Water–Energy–Food Nexus: Description, Theory and Practice. Geography Compass, 9, 445–460. doi: 10.1111/gec3.12222.

*My emphasis and with some reformatting '-' breaks.

 Hodges' model and reference to 'nexus'

With thanks to Stockholm Environment Institute