The Food-Energy-Water Nexus

The world of policymakers, researchers, and practitioners in resource management is abuzz with a new lexicon: the idea of Food-Energy-Water Nexus (hereafter the nexus). Thus, an idea that started at the World Economic Forum in 2008 has gained salience over time through the Bonn Conference in 2011 and the Rio +20 negotiations in 2012. Governing “the nexus” is probably one of the grand challenges of the twenty-first century. Who could deny that the nexus of water, energy, food, and the environment somehow encapsulate some of the world’s most pressing problems and that governance is a key part of the problem as well as the solution? Is there something to disagree about when the international business community through the World Economic Forum argues that there are important linkages among water, food, energy, and climate change? And when the German government argues that policymakers need to consider more carefully the trade-offs between these four different resources? Isn’t the idea of the nexus, after all, intuitively compelling, even as it challenges existing comfortable knowledge and approaches that have hitherto guided institutions managing these resources in independent silos? This article will cover these questions by adopting an issues theme with sections on Multisectoral Integration, Interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity, Governance, Justice and Ethics. A General Overviews section opens the article in introducing readers to the key texts on the topic. Only English-language sources have been included in this review.