Water, Energy, Food and People Across the Global South

'The Nexus' in an Era of Climate Change

Larry A. Swatuk, Corrine Cash, Larry A. Swatuk, Corrine Cash

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9783319640235
• eBook ISBN:
  9783319640242
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Energy Industry
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This collection critically engages the resource use nexus. Clearly, a nexus-approach to resource policy, planning and practice is essential if sustainable development goals are to be met. In particular, in an era of climate change, an integrated approach to water, energy and agriculture is imperative. Agriculture accounts for 70% of global water withdrawals, food production accounts for 30% of global energy use and a rising global population requires more of everything. As shown in this collection, scholars of resource development, governance and management are 'nexus sensitive', utilizing a sort of 'nexus sensibility' in their work as it focuses on the needs of people particularly, but not only, in the global South. Importantly, a nexus-approach presents academics and practitioners with a discursive space in which to shape policy through research, to deepen and improve understandings of the interconnections and impacts of particular types of resource use, and to critically reflecton actions taken in the name of the 'nexus'.

© The Author(s) 2018

Larry A. Swatuk and Corrine Cash (eds.)Water, Energy, Food and People Across the Global SouthInternational Political Economy Serieshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-64024-2_1

Begin Abstract

1. Perspectives on the Nexus: Water, Energy and Food Security in an Era of Climate Change

Larry A. Swatuk¹ and Corrine Cash²

(1)

School of Environment Enterprise and Development, University of Waterloo, Angtigonish, NS, Canada

(2)

Coady International Institute, St. Francis Xavier University, Antigonish, Nova Scotia, Canada

Larry A. Swatuk

End Abstract

Introduction

This collection is centered on the so-called nexus. According to the Merriam-Webster online dictionary, a ‘nexus’ may be defined as: (a) connection, link, and also a causal link; (b) a connected group or series and (c) center, focus (see www.​merriam-webster.​com/​dictionary/​nexus). There is a well-known trend in policymaking circles toward integrating water, energy and food policy—the WEF nexus —within an overarching climate change and security ‘nexus’ (see Water Alternatives special issue guest edited by Allouche et al. 2015 and International Journal of Water Resources Development special issue guest edited by Allan et al. 2015). This is reflected in the policy frameworks of the Department for International Development (DfID) and the German Development Agency (GIZ) where the ‘nexus’ is the new operating framework. In addition, significant forums such as the Stockholm World Water Week, hosted by the Stockholm International Water Institute (SIWI), and the World Economic Forum have drawn concentrated attention to the linked security issues surrounding water, energy and food, largely from a management perspective (WEF 2009; 2011a, b; 2015). The basic argument is that treating water resource management discreetly—even if within an Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) framework—is incomplete, because all water decisions impact possibilities for ‘energy security’ and ‘food security’ , particularly within an era of globalization under the overarching context of climate change. According to Stern and Öjendal (quoted in Leese and Meisch 2015: 695–696), a nexus ‘can be understood as a network of connections between disparate ideas, processes or objects; alluding to a nexus implies an infinite number of possible linkages and relations’. However, water, in the words of the WEF (2011a), is the ‘gossamer’ strands that hold the web of resource use together. In other words, water is at the heart of the nexus. So, water resource use decisions—even if biased toward blue water (defined as flowing surface water and accessible groundwater )—should at minimum take into consideration the role and place of water across key sectors, especially energy and food (and vice versa). There is also a sense of urgency about the nexus: the FAO (2014) highlights that agriculture accounts for 70 percent of global water withdrawals and that food production accounts for 30 percent of global energy use , so linkages are already significant. Moreover, it is anticipated that the rising global population will require 60 percent more food by 2050, that energy demands will increase by 50 percent by 2035 and that irrigation itself will use 10 percent more water than it does now. Thus, it is imperative that management practices ‘get it right’ sooner rather than later (see, also, Leese and Meisch 2015: 698). A nexus approach, it is argued, will enable the crafting of better policy and practice. For Al-Saidi and Elagib (2017: 1137), the WEF nexus is a ‘new kind of environmental policy paradigm’, and the nexus focus has, in their estimation, been quite successful in changing policy debates.

Outside of policy circles, there exists a critical and somewhat skeptical perspective on the ‘nexus’. It seems clear that, as a policy discourse, ‘the nexus approach’ is elite driven, drawing together state and private sector actors in a concerted attempt to deal with—through marketization and commoditization of essential goods—the hypothesized negative impacts of increasing resource demands across water, food and energy ‘sectors’ (Allouche et al. 2015; Leese and Meisch 2015: 704). On one level, the nexus is simply a fact: since water and energy availability affects food production , and methods of food and energy production affect water supplies, and since climate change adds uncertainty to existing supplies of freshwater, then food and energy ‘security’ will inevitably be impacted by water availability and so on, resulting in mutual vulnerability . To say that we should recognize these interlinkages and build them into resource use policy and practice is, in fact, to say nothing new. Al-Saidi and Elagib (2017), in their important review of the literature pertaining to the nexus, show how nexus thinking extends back to at least the 1980s across different disciplines in the sustainability sciences. Matthew, in his afterword to this collection, suggests that the nexus was first flagged in the Brundtland Commission Report, Our Common Future, with one essential difference: back then, the focus was on inter-governmental cooperation as the driving force behind sustainable development . In the current iteration, at least as it is articulated by groups such as the World Economic Forum , the key to sustainability lies with markets and the private sector . To systematically build this recognition into private sector practice, given current path dependencies related to physical supply chains and metaphysical objectives such as ‘profit’, is, however, both new and extremely difficult (Allan et al. 2015: 303–304). It is also highly problematic, particularly for those at the bottom of the global economic pyramid (Leese and Meisch 2015).

On another level, however, the ‘nexus’ may be read as an over-simplified and apolitical approach to resource management. For example, in her remarks made at the Waterloo workshop where these ideas and several of the chapters included here were first presented, Jennifer Clapp worried about the implications of ‘resource reductionism’, pointing out that food security has many dimensions beyond ‘supply’: for example, availability, access , stability and utilization. At the same time, she argued, there are many (global) drivers to water, energy and food insecurity that force us to look beyond ‘management of scarce resources’ as an adequate approach: for example, subsidies, trade agreements/trends, financial markets, global investment patterns, aid policies, geopolitical/economic considerations and so on. In his remarks made at the Waterloo meeting, Simon Dalby was equally skeptical, reminding us that when security moves into the conversation, other lenses such as ‘democracy’ or ‘equity’ or ‘sustainability’ tend to get squeezed out (cf. Leese and Meisch 2015). Dalby also points out the fact that climate change as a phenomenon is not a consequence of scarcity but of production: over-production and over-consumption leading to certain types of resource scarcity . In Richard Matthew’s words, ‘systems of scarcity generate big winners and big losers’. When scarcity and security are brought together in political discourse, the outcome is generally an attempt to secure, that is, to capture the available amount of, a resource perceived to be essential but increasingly scarce .

In his remarks made at the Waterloo meeting, Richard Matthew highlighted the ways in which ‘the nexus’, ‘the green economy’ and ‘natural capital’ all go together as a means of enabling business and governance elites to think about the interrelationship of things most often dealt with discretely: through separate ministries, departments and so on. Drawing on the ‘evidence’ provided by the World Economic Forum , for Matthew, it is quite astounding how swiftly business and policy elites have been able to (a) reduce complex and interrelated phenomena to a simple equation: growth puts pressure on linked resources, and therefore increased efficiency will reduce such pressure and (b) render ‘scarcity’ to a market-led, one-size-fits-all solution: since water is at the heart of the nexus, and since water is underpriced, the answer is to price water accordingly. Put differently, governance oversight combined with private sector entrepreneurial capacity will ensure that resources are allocated efficiently, so ensuring resource security. According to Matthew, ‘it is breathtaking how WEF can move to a solution in seconds’ (See his formal remarks on the Nexus here: https://​www.​youtube.​com/​watch?​v=​rIM0tJ1AkZQ; also, see his blog on the nexus here: http://​isn.​ethz.​ch/​Digital-Library/​Articles/​Detail/​?​lng=​en&​id=​179227). For Dalby , however, not all nexuses are the same, and we would do well to engage rather than ignore the nexus dialogue despite both our misgivings about its current characterization and our skepticism regarding our ability to alter its form.

The remarks highlighted above from Clapp, Dalby and Matthew were made at an international workshop entitled ‘Healthy Climates: interrogating the water-energy-food-climate security nexus’ held at the University of Waterloo in the winter of 2014. Several of the chapters in this collection were originally presented at this meeting and have undergone extensive revisions, while the balance has been specifically recruited because of their particular approach to understanding key questions relating to water within and beyond the ‘nexus’. It is clear from the papers presented at the Waterloo meeting and in this collection that scholars of resource development, governance and management are already ‘nexus sensitive’, utilizing a sort of ‘nexus sensibility’ in their own studies, whether it concerns the ways and means of achieving water security in rural villages in Tanzania or Botswana or...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Perspectives on the Nexus: Water, Energy and Food Security in an Era of Climate Change
• 2. Water, Energy and Food: The Problematic Aspects of the Transition from ‘Silo Approach’ to ‘Nexus Approach’ in the Arab Region
• 3. Natural Capital Accounting and Ecosystem Services Within the Water–Energy–Food Nexus: Local and Regional Contexts
• 4. Pigs, Prawns and Power Houses: Politics in Water Resources Management
• 5. Mitigating the Korle Lagoon Ecological Pollution Problem in Accra, Ghana, Through a Framework for Urban Management of the Environment
• 6. La Plata River Basin: The Production of Scale in South American Hydropolitics
• 7. The Social Flows of Water in the Global South: Recognizing the Water-Gender-Health ‘Nexus’
• 8. Water as Threat and Solution: Improving Health Outcomes in Developing Country Contexts
• 9. Household Water Insecurity in Different Settlement Categories of Ngamiland, Botswana
• 10. Evolution or Illusion? The Okavango Delta Management Planning Process Versus the Conventional Planning System in the Face of Climate Change and Variability in Botswana
• 11. Evaluating an Agri-Environmental Network and Its Role in Collaborative Problem-Solving
• 12. The New Green Revolution: Enhancing Rainfed Agriculture for Food and Nutrition Security in Eastern Africa
• 13. Afterward: Closing Thoughts on the Water–Food–Energy–Climate Nexus
• Back Matter