Food-Energy-Water Nexus: Opportunities and Limits of Integrationist Frameworks
The WEF nexus seeks to overcome isolationist tendencies in resource management, purporting to interlink food, energy, and water as resources, institutions, and essential elements of human security. Does the nexus – the latest in a series of integrationist frameworks – provide better conceptual clarity, operational tools, and human-security outcomes than its predecessors? I trace WEF nexus origins, synthesize insights from nexus thinking, identify limits in its application, and explore its inevitable demise. Emerging frameworks must ultimately confront social and political equity, climate, ecological, and economic-growth limits of resource use.
Christopher Scott, Ph.D.,
Director and Research Professor,
Udall Center for Studies in Public Policy,
University of Arizona