Perception and Representation of the Resource Nexus at the Interface between Society and the Natural Environment (original) (raw)
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Summary Paper: ‘Governance and Management of the Nexus: Structures and Institutional Capacities’
Change and Adaptation in Socio-Ecological Systems, 2015
Sustaining the water-energy-food nexus for the future requires new governance approaches and joint management across sectors. The challenges to the implementation of the nexus are many, but not insurmountable. These include trade-offs between sectors, difficulties of communication across the science-policy interface, the emergence of new vulnerabilities resulting from implementation of policies, and the perception of high social and economic costs. In the context of the Sustainability in the W-E-F Nexus conference May 19-20, 2014, the session on ‘Governance and Management of the Nexus: Structures and Institutional Capacities’ discussed these problems as well as tools and solutions to nexus management. The session demonstrated three key findings: 1. Trade-offs in the Water-Energy-Food Nexus should be expanded to include the varied and shifting social and power relations; 2. Sharing knowledge between users and policy makers promotes collective learning and science-policy-stakeholder c...
Routledge Handbook of the Resource Nexus
Routledge eBooks, 2017
Demand for natural resources has grown rapidly for decades, and is expected to continue growing. These trends lead to repercussions, risks, and threats for humans and ecosystems at different scales. The challenges of sustainable resource management and governance are on numerous agendas, ranging from the G7 and G20 summits to UNEP's International Resource Panel, World Economic Forum, SDG implementation, and a growing community of international scholars. Research highlights the importance of accounting for the interdependencies of resource use and sustainability goals such as eliminating hunger, mitigating climate change, and expanding energy access. There is a need to understand interdependencies and the feasibility of more integrated approaches. Debate is often framed in terms of a "nexus" between water, energy, and food (sometimes including other resources). 1 The main aim of this handbook is to come to grips with what the nexus 2 is about, provide a reference textbook with an overview, and a survey on emerging and cutting-edge research, and application of the concept. This handbook enables readers to understand (Part I), measure (Part II), assess and model (Part III), compare political economies (Part IV), learn from applications (Part V), and upscale solutions (Part VI). The handbook's six parts and 32 chapters are carefully organized around these aims. As a whole, the handbook seeks to combine analytical rigor with attempts to be transformativei.e. shaping transformations towards sustainabilityin realms of research and knowledge-making, as well as practice and implementation.
Governance and Management of the Nexus: Structures and Institutional Capacities
Change and Adaptation in Socio-Ecological Systems, 2015
globally, demanding higher consumption of energy resources; water is being overused or contaminated through both energy and food production schemes; and climate change is further pushing the planet towards environmental tipping points. Moreover, the linkages between water systems, food production, and energy systems are intertwined, which has resulted in scientific and political action to define and refine how we are addressing this nexus. Governance of this nexus is a key concern, and given the challenges and increasing attention aimed at nexus-based problems, what model for management and governance will be most efficient and equitable in each respective context? If anything is certain it is that paradigms representing segmented, rigid policies benefitting socially elite groups must be usurped and replaced by more interdependent, flexible, and equitable systems of governance and management. Sectors must cross-reference the respective needs and demands of multiple resources users, overcome tradeoffs and social barriers, and respond and adapt to new barriers. And networks must reorganize to better support more marginalized sectors such as the environment. This chapter lays out the challenges to governance in the WE -F nexus and provides concrete tools and recommendations for how to address these constraints.
Nexus approaches to global sustainable development
Nature Sustainability, 2018
With global population projected to exceed nine billion and per capita buying power expected to more than double by 2050, global challenges such as reducing food insecurity, water scarcity and fossil energy use, as well as improving human health and protecting the environment, are increasingly pressing and deeply interconnected 1. Major threats, such as climate change and its likely social, political and economic consequences compound the challenges and add further interlinkages 2. To address global challenges and threats, the United Nations has set 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) for 2030, including the provision of sufficient food, energy and water for all 3. But taking the SDG agenda seriously, and operationalizing it on the ground, is far from straightforward. Achieving the SDGs requires all relevant stakeholders to work together and manage the synergies and trade-offs among different management or governance sectors (for example, food, health, water and energy) 4. Although focused expertise and management remain important, traditional 'silo' approaches by specialized institutions and agencies alone cannot effectively address the linked challenges. Consider, for example, the Aral Sea. River water that had flowed into the Aral Sea was diverted to create irrigated desert croplands but also led to a substantial loss of a productive fishery as the lake dried and shrank to a tenth of its original size 5. These major impacts were avoidable. Well-made canals and efficient irrigation could have allowed agriculture to flourish while protecting the lake's biodiversity so that it provided a sustainable fishery 6. New integrated approaches and tools are needed to address the challenges posed by multiple and often conflicting human needs and demands, and to achieve the SDGs successfully. Numerous approaches have been developed to help address these issues, including the concepts of natural capital and ecosystem services 7,8 , quan-tification of environmental footprints 9 and planetary boundaries 10 , integrated water resource management and 'soft path' approaches to improve water use efficiency 11 , multifunctional landscapes 12 and integrated ecosystem management 13. Each of these concepts has multiple dimensions and is valuable for addressing some of the SDGs, and they can be extended to address synergies and trade-offs among sectors 14. The nexus concept builds on many of these approaches by emphasizing the importance of understanding connections, syn-ergies and trade-offs. The word nexus (from the Latin nectare, to connect 15) has long been used in philosophy, cell biology and economics , to refer to approaches that address the linkages between multiple distinct entities 16. Nexus terminology was first used in the natural resource realm in 1983 under the Food-Energy Nexus Programme, which sought integrated solutions to food and energy scarcity 16. Since then, it has been applied most frequently to studying connections among food, water and energy, sometimes with the addition of issues like biodiversity protection and human health, or within specific framings such as responding to climate change. Although the term can be overused 17,18 , we argue it is valuable to avoid the natural tendency to retreat into intellectual and institutional silos. Compared with previous integrated concepts, there has been a stronger demand for operationalization and solution-orientation by resource managers, policy makers and other stakeholders. With broad interest and impetus, there is an opportunity for co-development of actionable knowledge from nexus assessments for problem solving such as simultaneously achieving multiple SDGs (Table 1). Cross-sectoral integration is a major issue for both nexus approaches and SDGs. Many global challenges, though interconnected, have been addressed singly, at times reducing one problem while exacerbating others. Nexus approaches simultaneously examine interactions among multiple sectors. Recent quantitative studies have revealed that nexus approaches can uncover synergies and detect trade-offs among sectors. If well implemented, nexus approaches have the potential to reduce negative surprises and promote integrated planning, management and governance. However, application and implementation of nexus approaches are in their infancy. No studies have explicitly quantified the contributions of nexus approaches to progress toward meeting the Sustainable Development Goals. To further implement nexus approaches and realize their potential, we propose a systematic procedure and provide perspectives on future directions. These include expanding nexus frameworks that consider interactions among more sectors, across scales, between
In recent years, the notion of the nexus has gained immense traction in the domain of natural resource governance. It has captured high interest across academic, policy and popular debates, and has become the defining vocabulary to understand the interlinkages between land, water, food and climate. Driven by the alarmist rhetoric of uncertainty and scarcity, the nexus thinking is often couched in the language of security. This paper focuses on critical perspectives on the securitization of water, land, food, energy and climate change debates and the implications of the nexus for policy making and natural resources management. What are the drivers of this nexus re-thinking? Who is driving this debate of the nexus and to what ends? What do these debates tell us about the character of the development ‘industry’ and the political, ideological and institutional logics operating within it? What are the challenges of this nexus formulation, what spaces may open up for addressing issues of equality and justice? In October 2012, the STEPS Centre and SOAS organised a colloquium that set out to explore and address some of these questions. This paper draws on the critical insights from this meeting and explores some of the fundamental ways to unpack the nexus formulation and address the challenges therein.
Sustainable development as the ultimate target of adopting a nexus approach to resources management
2020
Resource productivity and sustainable development: Challenges and limitations The United Nations' Agenda for Sustainable Development underlines 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) with 169 targets. The lack of holistic knowledge on the interdependency between the SDGs and an interpretation of cause-and-effect relationships that connect the SDGs enormously challenges national policymakers that must implement that are in charge of implementing the 2030 agenda at the national level and achieving the goals across environmental, economic, and social dimensions (Griggs et al. 2017; Dörgo et al. 2018). The international scientific community started to measure the trade-offs and synergies between SDGs. For this exercise, it proved helpful to make use of the concept of the water-energy-food (WEF) nexus, which showed that when addressing challenges like water, energy and food security, integrated approaches to resources management across these sectors should be used and dependent resources considered equally (Hoff 2011). The WEF nexus concept is now starting to be implemented and is recognised as an essential tool for achieving and monitoring progress towards SDGs (Bleischwitz et al. 2018; Hülsmann & Ardakanian 2018). Nevertheless, the WEF is still challenged by a few limitations, in particular concerning comprehensive coverage of the interlinkages between sectors and resources (Albrecht et al. 2018). Besides, nexus assessments are only starting to address all dimensions of sustainability, including the environmental aspect, one primary reason being that ecosystem services (WEF-E) are hardly reflected in nexus tools (Hülsmann et al. 2019). This chapter aims to highlight the necessity of including innovative tools in the assessment of the WEF nexus approach to adopt resources management to achieve Sustainable development. To effectively counteract the potential trade-offs across SDGs, holistic ecosystem management and sustainable practices are required to increase resource productivity. Sector-oriented resource management often neglects the potential impacts (trade-offs and synergies
Resource nexus perspectives towards the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals
Nature Sustainability
Debate around increasing demand for natural resources is often framed in terms of a "nexus" and perhaps at risk of becoming a buzz word. A nexus between what, at what scales, and what would be the consequences? This article analyses why readers should care about the nexus concept towards the SDGs. We discuss a five-nodes definition and propose perspectives that may lead to a reload of climate policy with buy-in from supply chain managers and resourcerich developing countries. Our research perspectives address modelling approaches and scenarios at the interface of bio-physical inputs with the human dimensions of security and governance.
Governance of the nexus: from buzz words to a strategic action perspective
2014
In this think piece, we develop the foundations for a strategic action perspective on the governance of the nexus. Our enquiry into the governance dimension of the nexus incorporates three propositions. First, it acknowledges that nexus challenges cannot be separated from the perceptions, interests, and practices of actors associated with a nexus. Second, our approach builds on a relational understanding of nexus governance as arising from relationships between actors (actor networks) and ideas and interests (issue networks) across multiple domains. Third, our approach emphasizes the need for addressing nexus challenges by working with and through existing governance arrangements. The think piece is structured in two sections. In the first section we develop the conceptual foundations for a strategic action perspective on nexus governance. In the second section we illustrate the potential of this approach by presenting the results of an empirical study of a water-foodenergy-environment nexus in Ethiopia. We conclude with some reflections and possible ways forward for a research agenda on the nexus.
Anatomy of a buzzword: the emergence of the ‘water-energy-food’ nexus in UK resource debates
The existence of a water-energy-food 'nexus' has been gaining significant attention in international natural resource policy debates in recent years. We argue the term 'nexus' can be currently seen as a buzzword: a term whose power derives from a combination of ambiguous meaning and strong normative resonance. We explore the ways in which the nexus terminology is emerging and being mobilised by different stakeholders in natural resource debates in the UK context. We suggest that in the UK the mobilisation of the nexus terminology can best be understood as symptomatic of broader global science-policy trends, including an increasing emphasis on integration as an ideal; an emphasis on technical solutions to environmental problems; achievement of efficiency gains and 'win-wins'; and a preference for technocratic forms of environmental managerialism. We identify and critique an 'integrative imaginary' underpinning much of the UK discourse around the concept of the nexus, and argue that attending to questions of power is a crucial but often underplayed aspect of proposed integration. We argue that while current efforts to institutionalise the language of the nexus as a conceptual framework for research in the UK may provide a welcome opportunity for new forms of transdisciplinary, they may risk turning nexus into a 'matter of fact' where it should remain a 'matter of concern'. In this vein, we indicate ways of building nexus research upon critique.