The Water Dissensus – A Water Alternatives Forum
Can nexus avoid the fate of IWRM?
Can Nexus avoid the fate of IWRM?
[This discussion is now closed]
Is the nexus approach the harbinger of a transformative paradigm shift? I argue it promises to be the start of such a new journey for both academia and activists but is fraught with pitfalls of old habits and entrenched hegemonies.
Environmentalists have always emphasized the interconnectedness of natural resources. Nexus as a concept has been around for decades. It found new life when the business community discovered the disastrous domino effect cascading through different sectors of the economy with the 2008 financial crisis. A fortuitous convergence of thinking between business and activist communities has broadened the support for intersectoral, i.e. "nexus", solutions. This is potentially unlike the equally laudable integrated water management (IWRM) paradigm which was hijacked by water agencies to prevent radical transformation by focusing on technocratic and procedural solutions.
Examples abound of projects designed and implemented within narrow disciplinary or departmental silos that failed to incorporate important benefits or unknowingly caused harm. However, when one looks for good examples of nexus planning and implementation, they are difficult to find. So, what is new with the nexus paradigm? At its core lie much-ignored aspects of governance: moving away from technocratic fixes of "wicked" problems; recognizing complex trade-offs; replacing faith in full control with flexibility and adaptive management; and giving equal primacy to not-easily quantifiable values of ethics and justice arrived at by listening to marginalized grassroot voices.
Unlike IWRM, which had water as the center of attention and the river basin as the theater of integrated management, nexus broadens the field to energy, food, transport, health, climate change, and much more. This nexus focus across physically dissimilar sectors and wide geographical spread opens up both rich new possibilities and bewildering conceptual and methodological challenges.
For example, linking water and energy inevitably brings in climate change: the energy sector is a major cause, but social and economic impacts are mainly felt through the water sector. It is not just changing flood-drought intensity and frequency, but also changes in humidity/soil moisture leading to the destruction of old cropping practices, prolific spread of invasive species, urban water shortages, disease pandemics, etc. The energy sector has dominated the climate discourse with its problem definition (average temperature rise) and solution (mitigation and shift to renewables). Could a nexus approach to, for example, multiple forms of water storage for multiple uses – from wetlands and water harvesting to groundwater and storage dams –make a better contribution to climate accords by killing several birds with one stone?
Closer to home for this writer, the Indian government recently passed an Act to make the River Ganga (along with 110 other rivers) navigable year-round, which is impossible without storage of monsoon flows in Nepal. Will this see an alliance of commercial interests looking for cheap, energy-efficient transport with environmentalists battling an entrenched irrigation bureaucracy that vows not to let a drop be wasted to the sea? A nexus approach to environmental politics would certainly open up that possibility in the currently moribund transboundary negotiations between Nepal, Bangladesh and India.
Such a nexused outcome is neither inevitable nor easy. As with IWRM, mainstream analysts in big corporations and government agencies are likely to frame the nexus problem as manageable through the same old technocratic tools of methodological individualism – expert modelling using efficiency-driven criteria – and market myopia, which does not bode well. Nexus is in danger of getting enmeshed within the same comfort zone as IWRM, of silo practitioners filtering out uncomfortable knowledge around social injustice and powerful hegemonies that marginalize the weak.
Where would a more nexused journey start from? I argue that any opportunity to transcend silos and practice a real nexus approach can come about in one of three ways: 1) by the serendipitous appearance of enlightened statesmen; 2) during disasters and major disruptions when silo thinking's limitations get exposed (which seems to be happening during the Covid-19 lock-down); or 3) by reforming institutional arrangements to reflect genuine pluralism in management styles.
This third avenue, re-tooling governance, is the most challenging but ultimately most sustainable path to implementing nexus solutions. It will require government agency, market and civic players to be nudged towards a genuine partnership of public-private-civic "constructive engagement". This does not happen naturally, but it lies at the very core of natural resource and environmental politics. In Nepal, the success of community electricity distribution (some run by women's groups operating agriculture cooperatives or community forestry programs) is an example of change through effective nexus politics.
Bureaucratic agencies with their penchant for control and market individualism focused on monetary profit are conservative forces of silo thinking and practice. However, they can be nudged towards a nexus approach by a coalition of civic society partners. Academics engaging in trans-disciplinary research and advocacy can influence and support journalists and politicians who often need to consider multiple interlinkages in their work. Trans-disciplinary academia promotes "problem feeding" from one discipline (and thus one silo) to another, to redefine the nature of the solution they would otherwise have promoted. This of course is somewhat theoretical.
In practice, getting powerful technocratic bureaucracies to open themselves up to the lived experiences of the marginalized will be a very political process, of different intensities in varied societies. Success or failure (or probably something in between) of the nexus approach, and avoiding the fate of IWRM, will be determined by the nature, scale and intensity of the engagement, which is bound to be clumsy, as all political processes are.
Dipak Gyawali
Dipak Gyawali is a hydropower engineer-political economist, an academician with Nepal Academy of Science and Technology and used to chair Nepal Water Conservation Foundation. He was Nepal's minister for water resources in 2002/2003.
Comments 30
I am afraid that the interrelations that the nexus concept describes are too many, too diverse, too vaguely defined and too complex to be manageable to any meaningful extent; also we do not have yet institutions in place (neither legislation, nor agencies, nor traditions neither customs, nor procedures for decision-making, not user organizations) to manage any single component of the nexus in an integrated manner. And there are probably good reasons why this is so (fear of high transaction costs, Leviofan bureaucracy, contradictory incentives, political dynamics, etc.). So this (nexus management) simply cannot be done, for now and in the, at least, medium-term future, I even would say in the long-term future. Rather, it should be considered as one of the guiding principles in the gradual improvement of our current management institutions. Also it will be useful in the consideration, on the case-by-case basis, of certain problems that involve all (or some of the) nexus elements in an integrated manner.
The role of geopolitics is a critical one. In the Asian context , the annexation of the previously independent kingdom of Tibet has forever altered the transboundary discourse. Responding to the mention of transboundary river basin with mentions of India, Nepal and Bangladesh and without a mention of China, makes for an incomplete understanding. Almost all the major river basins-Brahmaputra, Indus, Sutlej, Mekong (which further feed the other major subcontinetal rivers) needs to be cognizant of these realities. Without taking into account the dynamic geopolitics, role of IFIs, businesses and domestic politics of riparain countries in the truest sense, the nexus concept will fall woefully short, and not be an advancement over the IWRM idea. Academia in particular needs to take a hard look within and come up to speed with the changing realities. Most importantly community based organisations need to have a real seat at the table to bring the people's voices who will bear the brunt of these decisions
I agree with the analysis, and can add that the Nexus approach can also be compared to the idea of integrated basin management and to the new paradigms imposed by climate change. All these approaches require a multi-sectoral approach and face the same challenges.
I also agree with Andrei's comment, especially in the Chilean case (which I know better), where one can see that any change to the legislation on water (free market approach) is resisted by a strong lobby of sectors such as mining, agriculture and energy.
In general, I believe that the Nexus approach is useful for providing background for decision makers, but it does not allow for addressing the historical problems of institutions (i.e. dispersion of powers, lack of coordination, etc.) and obsolete legislation. In my view, both the Nexus approach and the challenges of climate change face the same fate, because they have to deal with the same barriers: vested interests, the prevailing economic paradigm, institutional inertia, among others.
What is the impact on the ground of the literally tens of books on the 'water+' nexus, and of the global conferences devoted to it in the past decade? What benefits can be exhibited against the costs of these discussions? A clear, largely negative, impact is the associated discursive emphasis on capital-intensive, expert-driven, market-oriented solutions that further cement the global discourse on the 'green economy', 'ecological intensification', 'payment for environmental services', 'pricing and market instruments' and other business friendly responses to water scarcity compatible with growth and profit maximization.
I would argue that the nexus per se is not a problem (it does draw our attention to the complex tradeoffs that have to be made between sectors) but, if becoming a global hegemonic policy concept (consuming huge intellectual and financial resources), it certainly is a step backward with relation to IWRM: IWRM, at least, is a boundary concept which people concerned by the social and environmental dimensions of water can engage with. The nexus offers nothing of the like and remains largely confined to approaches and concepts such as optimization, tradeoffs, input-output, life-cycle assessment, material flow analysis, etc. that, in addition, bump into poor/inexistent data and overwhelming complexity, 'flatten' reality, and eventually achieve very little (see the recent review of 245 'nexus papers' by Abrecht et al. which concludes that "nexus methods frequently fall short of capturing interactions among water, energy, and food—the very linkages they conceptually purport to address"…). Although some of the nexus commenters (and even promotors) have called for a 'deepening' or 'widening' of the concept, in particular towards social dimensions, what's left of that at the end?
To echo Andrei's comment: let's take sectoral policies at the governmental level, for example: where has 'the nexus' been able to go beyond instilling a discrete acknowledgement that indeed 'everything is connected'? Where has nexus-thinking led to the recognition of detrimental spillover effects of one policy over another sector to the point of motivating substantial policy changes? What we see rather, to take one example, are pervasive agricultural development policies that unrelentingly make light of both the environment and energy implications. Counter-examples of nexus pennyworth to prove this wrong are welcomed!
I agree with what has been said in the forum thus far. If we look at the WEF nexus concept, I do not think that it will bring about a paradigm shift within the water community, be it a policy paradigm shift or a scientific paradigm shift. Within the policy community, the incorporation of WEF nexus thinking, like IWRM, into policies will be superficial with stakeholders proclaiming they are practicing a nexus approach in the their respective arenas, but it will be business as usual on the ground. In this business as usual scenario, old habits and entrenched myopic thinking along empirical and positivist thinking prevails. The reference to the Abrecht et al. article Francois provided shows how empiricism and positivism are entrenched in nexus thinking particularly where nexus assessments favour quantitative approaches and the limited use of social science methods. This indicates a flatland fallacy, also mentioned in the article and by Francois, where scholars proclaim complexity thinking to address complex problems but do not consider the theoretical limitations of the theory. Many scholars and practitioners think that complexity is the only perspective needed to explain and understand realities around the interaction between water, energy and food. However, complexity is one of many theories with the ability to explain and understand numerous interconnections. Academia and practitioners treat it as a parsimonious theory that perports an efficient way of painting a simplified picture of complex reality. Complexity is ontologically a low dimensional theory and as such it is apolitical in that it does not take political realities into consider other than by saying these are complex.
By default this holds also for the WEF nexus in that the focus is on three seemingly interconnected sectors each focusing on a specific benefit and involving particular disciplines and professions entrenched in empiricist and positivist thinking. The focus on water puts the resource front and foremost and links it with sustainable development theory and ideology that promises benefits through instrumentality. Here various natural science disciplines are dominant. For energy and food; economics, efficiency and engineering are the call to arms, so to speak, with their empiricist and positivist inclinations towards explaining how these two sectors connect with water and how the instrumental application of quantitative analytical methods will bring about positive outcomes.
My conclusion from this is that the WEF nexus is efficiently interconnected at a scientific paradigm level where the dominance of scholarly hegemonies leans towards empiricism at the expense of normative manifestations in society. WEF nexus thinking paints a picture of a world that 'is' interconnected between water, energy and food and rarely asks what 'ought' to be. Dipak touches on the 'what ought to be' question when he argues for a public-private-civic arrangement and brings politics and decentralised energy arrangements in Nepal into the equation.
From a Political Science and International Relations perspective, we need to ask ourselves when investigating WEF nexus arrangements, who governs and who benefits (Hobson and Seabrooke)? In my opinion it will show that certain disciplines connect with governance and political arrangements driven by the belief that science speaks truth to power. Should we ask the question differently, who acts and what are the consequences of their actions (Hobson and Seabrooke), we will start seeing instances where citizens take action in providing water, energy and food at a communal level with governance arrangements independent from centralised government in place that could play a more emancipatory role for those who need the three resources the most: the poor and marginalised.
Policy dialogue is central to the nexus approach
I agree with all the elements developed in the different posts/comments. Nexus approach recognizes that we have many goals, all-legitimate, and that addressing them all may in some cases be synergetic (poverty reduction and food security) or antagonistic (produce more and consume less resources), in which case the art of the dialogue is to find acceptable solutions (trade-offs).
The nexus offers an approach that combines understanding the complex relationships and interactions between different sectors, incorporates knowledge of dynamic local conditions and context, and aims to produce policy-oriented and practical resource management results. Policy dialogue is central to the nexus approach and finding sustainable solutions from an environmental, political, social and economic perspective. Policy dialogue brings together all stakeholders to improve understanding of past stresses, current trends and future risks.
The current management and regulatory systems, the competition for scarce resources and budgets between different ministries and agencies, and the difficulties in data management and access to information, they all do not encourage cooperation between different sectors. They also make it difficult to organize coordinated actions involving multiple ministries and public agencies to address cross cutting issues in a coherent way that takes into account: the economic; social; environmental and political dimensions, especially knowing the budgets of the separate and independent bodies. The lack of relevant information hampers the possibilities of establishing objective relationships not only between sectoral strategies, but also between them and users. The declination at the regional level is disconnected from the vision advocated at the national level. It relies more particularly on instant responses to the evolution of the "challenges of the day".
Investment planning and strategies for each sector take place within the relevant ministry and their regional agencies as well as local authorities. Improved data would help to understand policy interactions and how government support is coordinated across the wide range of ministries, public institutions and authorities; and sub-national, basin, farm or sectoral level data to enable a better understanding of the potential impact of different policies.
Much the same as IWRM the Nexus concept requires basic common sense and relevance in planning and operational processes. From a management leadership perspective there has to be the planning, oversight, execution, maintaining, and upgrading, based on the supply and demand for the specific e.g. nexus resource. IWRM was developed, originally with northern hemipshere countries in mind. One of the reasons for its criticism was that developing countries faced (and still do) a multitude of problems in the management and governance of water and sanitations services. Complex systems and cultural diversity in water and wastewater processes have to be accommodated.
There needs to be more scaling of nexus components from the very local (even personal) to the global (planetary) level in a creative snd functional way where we can perceive the obvious benefits or disadvantages to the way in which the small granules of ideas and reality pass through the nexus in the universal time glass.
Chances are that resilience, as was the case with sustainable development (as a result of its moralising high ground) will become outdated.
A pragmatic adaptive shift will then be required for the water sector to move on to yet another plane of thinking in the evolution of human thought, technologies and whatever social-ecological needs may be.
Working in the humanitarian context, I am thinking of the nexus in a more practical way on a smaller scale than even river basins.
I think that with the current challenges the main takeaway is to get away from thinking in silos. The settings we work in, the beneficiaries we work with, they and their needs as well as environmental and future needs can't be put in silos.
We can't have a technocrat who doesn't consider social backgrounds or a social worker who doesn't understand how to implement a water supply system.
But we do need a bit of all the different fields in order to deliver our work as good as possible.
I personally think that water+ nexus thinking helps a lot in understanding the importance of interdisciplinary work.
I was personally taught in IWRM and later the nexus and I can say that the nexus influences my thinking, working and planning in all matters and I think that's a good thing.
Yet, it's a more philosophical issue that all practitioners of any academic field in the sense of inter/transdisciplinary work adding to all fields.
Still, especially in my context I don't see ways of practically implementing it as it really gets to big for a project team that often only consists of 1 or 2 people and limited financial resources which often makes decide for one or the other while we know there would be a number of other issues to combat if we could.
In this useful comparison between IWRM and nexus approaches, IWRM wins.
First, nexus approaches reinforce the myth of ‘sectors’ – ignoring how human beings need water to meet multiple domestic and productive needs. ‘Sectors’ depoliticize intra-sectoral differentiation and, hence, the broader power relations that determine whether and how even basic domestic and productive water needs are met, or not.
Second, sectors and nexus keep ignoring the lowest-hanging fruit of integration: multi-purpose water infrastructure from household to basin scales. Low incremental costs to a single-use design bring high benefits.
Third, in nexus approaches, powerful professionals hand pick the ‘sectors’ of their liking. For example, nobody has been working on a productive-reproductive/domestic nexus. Yet, this would be key for gender equality, nutrition, food security and income, leaving no one behind, certainly in today’s pandemic.
Fourth, sector and nexus approaches cement competition among professionals at the expense of the most vulnerable. For example, the WASH sector focuses on legitimate, widely recognized priorities of safe drinking water and hand washing, but ignores other domestic water uses (which don’t require drinking water quality) and even basic productive uses, such as homestead cultivation. Yet, the WASH sector remains toothless in competition with any productive nexus of sector. The latter simply relegate the responsibility to prioritize ‘domestic water uses’ to the WASH sector, leaving them no other options than sending expensive water tankers.
Fifth, persistent promotion of sectoral and nexus interests continues to leave the burning question about the rationale behind administrative sectoral organization unanswered: how can central treasury both avoid overlap in allocating funding and organize specialist expertise, but in other ways than through sectoral departments?
In contrast, IWRM is a useful concept, provided all ‘managers’ are included, also beyond the formal realms. Informally, communities combine multiple, variable water sources, to meet their multiple needs through – unsurprisingly - multi-purpose infrastructure as the rule, and single-purpose infrastructure (e.g. to distant fields) as the exception. Informal sharing arrangements evolve. Rural communities have managed this complexity and incremental improvement as a matter of daily life, if not survival, since time immemorial. They can explain this to outsiders in a morning of resource mapping and an afternoon of transect walks - if outsiders listen to this people-driven ‘pull for integration from below’.
Hi Barbara. I thought from previous interaction you were foresworn against IWRM, I now guess it was more a critique of its mal-application than total opposition to the concept and principle. Thanks for putting very succinctly what IWRM offers
Hi Simon, even more good things of IWRM: it did unite all water professionals in a joint endeavor to get water on general policy agendas, as SDG6. Within the (hardening?) general silos, water - beyond urban middle class interests- easily evaporates (e.g., climate change, agriculture). So, yes, our point was the malapplication of IWRM. The resulting 'lost decades' are well documented in the WaA Special Issue on 'Flows and Practices. The politics of IWRM in Southern Africa' (Mehta, Derman and Manzungu eds).
Today's challenges require polycentric and transformative approaches like nexus thinking, circular economy and sustainable food systems to provide answers to today's challenges. The idea that everything should evolve around water is gone. In actual fact, nexus thinking or nexus planning is about cross-sectoral analysis and not sectoral, no sector is considered to be more important than the others. Once a so called nexus approach focuses on one sector it ceases to be one and diverts from the chore of the concept. Moreover nexus thinking is not only about WEF nexus, but there are many nexuses out there. Thinking only of the WEF nexus is also misleading. In other words there is no cherry picking of sectors in nexus planning. There are other nexuses like urban nexus, water-health-ecosystems-nutrition nexus, among others.But of course the WEF nexus has been the most popular.
The myth that nexus planning is only good as a conceptual or discourse framework is gone. There are tools that have been developed that provide cross-sectoral quantitative relationships between sectors and indicate priority areas for intervention. Nexus planning has evolved into an important analytical framework,important in decision-making. Actually, through ongoing nexus research, there are analytical tools that have been developed and have been helpful in assessing progress towards SDGs. A paper to this effect will be published in two weeks time in the Environmental Science and Policy Journal (Elsevier).
Within recent memory for many of us, the Cambodian economist Dr. Khieu Samphan (Ph. D., la Sorbonne) was empowered to explore "polycentric and transformative approaches to provide cross-sectoral quantitative relationships between sectors and indicate priority areas for intervention" in implementing "progress towards SDGs". How did that work out? https://www.eccc.gov.kh/en/indicted-person/khieu-samphan
The Nexus is hardly new. In 1970, as part of its bid to resist growing global opposition to apartheid, South Africa's government reviewed the strategic challenges posed by its limited natural water resource. Amongst them it noted that agriculture should not get a greater share of the country's water, use of water for energy would have to be constrained (dry cooled coal power stations and nuclear only at the coast); that was because the growing urban/industrial centres would need more of what was available. So, already then, it was obvious that water/energy/food were connected but that the game-changer would be the urban/industrial economy. To their credit, they even recognised that environmental protection would restrict how much of the available water could be used.
Fifty years on, the conclusions haven't changed - although environmental requirements have received increased prominence and pollution by urban/industrial users is imposing more costs on other users. So a limited focus on the WEF Nexus thinking back in 1970 would have missed the two primary drivers of the next half century. The only value of the concept is to remind us that, in different locations, there will be different sets of water-related interests, working out their modus operandi in the political economy of the moment.
My thesis is that, in 1992, IWRM served one set of (primarily European) interests, the environmentalists, who explicitly identified it as a paradigm that would help to amplify their voice; for example, the focus on the river basin as the locus of policy allowed them to escape from more traditional boundaries of democratic government. Meanwhile the Nexus was promoted by a set of management consultants and given credence by the other WEF (the World Economic Forum) to help rescue a complex policy domain from the IWRM paradigm which had served to sideline many other social and economic interest groups. So, while the notion that there are tradeoffs between different water uses is obvious, the concept of the Nexus allowed other parties to come back to the policy table.
Various elements of this argument at:-
http://www.water-alternatives.org/index.php/alldoc/articles/vol8/v8issue1/271-a8-1-4/file
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/325667072_Scale_and_consequences_-_The_limits_of_the_river_basin_as_a_management_unit
Mike's post says something about the invention of concepts to fit reality, or, more specifically, to invent new policy prescriptions to address problems on the ground. If South Africa already has WEF thinking in place since the 1970s, I am wondering if developed countries are not lagging behind in their thinking/practice nexus? Does the developed world invent new concepts and policy paradigms to impose on developing countries that are already, and for decades, thinking along WEF nexus lines? It would appear that, in South Africa at least, climatic conditions have forced drought prone developing countries to think as Mike described. In Europe, they are only now starting to experience recurring drought. Last year, I visited Germany, and my German colleagues all spoke about the previous year's 'severe' drought experienced by many European countries. Under these circumstances, is a policy paradigm shift, informed by WEF nexus thinking, not more applicable to the European context than to our regularly drought prone situation where we are already thinking and practicing WEF? If this is the case, and I argued this last year in Germany, they should learn from our experiences in dealing with drought and not the other way around. In this regard, climate change thinking could have played a significant role in the development of the WEF nexus. Developed countries start seeing the effects thereof on their economies, invented the WEF nexus as a policy paradigm, informed by empiricism and and positivism, and now have to 'export' the concept in the form of consulting services to developing countries. This relates to the power dynamics found in global governance issues.
Richard, I don't think it's a question of countries lagging behind. Paradigms are successful where they respond more effectively to their context than their competitors (Kuhn, 1960s). So the South African paradigm of the 1970s was not unique - it reflected what was happening the in the western USA as well as Australia from a hydrological point of view. What was perhaps different was the political context with 1970s centralised South Africa more clearly concerned about its strategic security than federal Australia (which took so much longer to get to grips with its cross-border 'problem-sheds' and only did so by invoking the economic competition provisions of their Commonwealth Constitution). But Spain did similar things as well (nothing like dictatorships to help override more complex political processes) until a completely unrelated political upset turned a rash manifesto promise, of a party that did not expect to get elected, into policy - and Barcelona nearly died of drought! Meanwhile, just a couple of months ago, the UK released a water strategy that recognises that water resource planning should cross river basin boundaries and that transfers and storage infrastructure may be important, a response to the recognition that the climate may be somewhat drier and more variable than before.
These examples illustrate my basic point:
Water resource governance and the paradigms on which it is based reflect the physical and political context (as they ought to). And attempts to impose paradigm from other contexts are likely to fail although, as we saw with IWRM, if they have sufficient funding behind them, they can make a significant impact in poorer communities, despite being manifestly inappropriate.
Mike, thank you very much for supplying more examples to enrich the perspective. Yes, you are correct that policy paradigms reflect physical and political contexts. Considering this, Israel is another typical example where we see changes in policy paradigms. On Kuhn, we need to be aware that policy paradigms and scientific paradigms (e.g. positivism and interpretivism) differ. There is a common denominator running through both, though: ideas in fluid contexts.
It would take too much time to fully respond, but the use of the Spanish case here is incorrect. It is a simplistic and wrong concatenation of facts (New Water Culture; 2004 elections; 2008 Barcelona drought) that do not reflects the evolution of water management and water policy in Spain during the last decades.
It would be nice if you could describe briefly that evolution and its principal political drivers.
Let me try and brutally summarize/interpret the rich discussions so far before outlining some challenges:
Both the nexus approach and its predecessor IWRM are appealing in theory but without much to show in actual successful policy measures. They are, however, forcing us to move to another uncomfortable plane of thinking; but a pragmatic adaptive shift in practice seems to be a long way off.
As with IWRM, Nexus approach too seems to work at the bottom of the institutional totem pole (e.g. the household kitchen and community efforts) but fails rather dramatically as we move up to national and international levels.
Sectoral institutions world-wide have evolved and entrenched themselves in privileged positions they will defend robustly. Over-riding their vested interests and forcing them onto a path of better cooperation with other silos (by whom? How?) via the nexus approach looks bleak at the present.
Policy community is unable to affect a paradigm shift because it is mostly locked into old, entrenched quantitative positivism emphasizing descriptive rather than interpretive social sciences. They consume most of the resources of the nexus world at the expense of praxis activists fighting for urgently needed change.
Policy dialogue is central to the nexus approach but questions remain: dialogue between whom and on what terms within the current context of policy hegemony? This question is more relevant in the Global South that has gone along with concepts developed in the North, with technocrats trying to force "integration" as per their understanding while social activists opt for better "harmony" with existing social order.
Can the potential in the nexus approach be harnessed to breath new life into sputtering environmental and social movements? Should the effort be put in sub-nexuses such as food-transport, water-storage, urban housing-WEF, or nutrition-water-health? Or does championing trans-disciplinary education hold better promise, producing for the future WEF+ nexus resource managers?
Three examples at different institutional levels, local to international, bring home the need for not ignoring a nexused (or integrated or harmonious) approach:
The current Covid-19 pandemic has exposed a dangerous lack of nexus thinking: politicians and film stars have come on TV asking people to maintain social distancing and wash their hands with soap many times for at least 20 seconds in each try. What does this injunction mean (to the WASH efforts in particular) in the vast majority of villages and congested urban dwellings where almost a dozen labourers share a room with one outhouse, and where there is barely 6 liters of water per capita?
In early 1980s, Nepal established a truly nexused platform, the Water and Energy Commission which had permanent secretaries of 12 relevant ministries as members to deliberate on interlinkages and cross-sectoral impacts of development activities. Except in the area of transboundary negotiations, this platform was never asked by the government to provide advice in key controversies, and sectoral decisions were approved by the cabinet, often times to their latter regret. Is a purely bureaucratic nexused platform futile without it being simultaneously a more plural one that includes activists and market players as well?
The clean up of the Rhine post 1986 Sandoz spill represents an outstanding transboundary success of sectors, levels and social organizing styles. If the "Sewer of Europe" could be cleaned up, ANY river in the world should be amenable to cleaning. What nexus lessons can be drawn from this and many other success stories?
"Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution" Clay Shirky Principle, or even more brutely "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!"Upton Sinclair.
Based on personal experience over 15 years, IWRM was never comfortable for the technocrats. Indeed, they challenged and resisted interference by non-experts, but were in many instances overwhelmed by the superior logic and international demand for inclusive (multistakeholder) in decision making since The Brundtland Report on Our Common Future and the adoption of Agenda 21 at Rio 1992.
Several authoritarian governments in the global south found the mobilisation of social capital from non-technical stakeholders quite useful, and IWRM as an organising principle became rapidly accepted as an iterative process towards better, more effective planning tool that brought on board different water users and sector institutions often in competition with one another.
However, there was push back from some technocrats, supported by their international funding agencies, uncomfortable with the slowness of decision making that stakeholder processes and intersectoral give-and-take required.
Thus came the "IWRM light", the WEF Nexus, positioned by its promoters as the practical business-case oriented trade-off between just three sectors enabling a much after turn round. unfortunately, the platforms or organisations that initially supported IWRM seemed to cave in to the energy and confidence exuded by the new kid on the block, some even seeking to abandon the IWRM principle in favour of "practice" or "implementation" and seeking changed mandate for themselves.
In my subsequent experience- despite the expedited process the WEF nexus brought on board- practitioners and stakeholders sustained the momentum often below water (a frog's perspective, to misquote Dipak) and it continues to inform situations where the issues and actors demand complex, integrated responses. Like climate change, environmental restoration and biodiversity conservation, where decisions based on trade-offs between sensitive social groups is necessary.
Secondly, the greatest attribute of IWRM is the participatory, social process, that challenges and forces technocrats to examine their decisions, and not the panacea it seems to promise that is much derided by sceptics.
Thus, WEF is step towards the riverbank, but IWRM will get you to the other side.
The idea to have in this FORUM a comparative analysis between IWRM and the WEF Nexus is great and I hope it will finally provide to all of us: academics, engineers, water professionals and decision-makers, with some useful inside on how to deal with the complex issue of Water Resources Management.
From the previous discussion, which I found very rich in arguments and personal experiences on this topic, I must confess that I am a bit confused by the mixing of different issues, like technical methodologies, water policies, inter-disciplinarity, social issues, cost-benefit evaluation, water management, politics and water governance.
IWRM and the WEF Nexus are not either policy frameworks or regulatory directives: they are technical/scientific methodologies that can be translated into policy documents if these methodologies are not only theoretical but have a basis for practical applications. In this direction, the question is twofold: (1) WHAT are the main elements inside each acronym (analytical framework), and (2) HOW each methodology can be implemented (theory and practice).
The Integrated Management Approach, which is the key-stone of IWRM, started with the 1972 UN Stockholm Conference that replaced the “eco-development” by the “sustainable development”. The UN Rio declaration in 1992, based on the so-called 1987 Brundtland Report on “Our Common Future” has further analyzed this concept that becomes a topic for research in many Universities in Europe and the USA.
Thanks to the Google Scholar I re-discovered a paper I have written on this “new” at that time scientific paradigm (see
the pdf at:
http://www.inweb.gr/files/Papers/Water Resources Management at the Turn of the Millenium - Towards a New Scientific Paradigm (2001).pdf
IWRM is not only a theoretical methodology as it was described in detail by the following GWP Technical Document No 4: https://www.gwp.org/globalassets/global/toolbox/publications/background-papers/04-integrated-water-resources-management-2000-english.pdf
It was converted in policy regulation with the 2000 EU Water Framework Directive (EU-DFD 60/2000/EC) after many years of negotiations between the EU Commission, the EU Parliament and, consultation with private and public companies. See the following link:
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:32000L0060
Ten years after the first implementation of the EU-WFD, which is compulsory to all 27 European Member States, the EC has launched an evaluation process, called the “Fitness Check of the WFD”.
The main drawback of the IWRM framework is about the issue of “Integration”. Also in mathematics, integration is much more difficult than differentiation. In IWRM around “water” at the center it is not clearly explained what is to integrate and how this integration will be implemented. In the IWRM methodology we can read that we should integrate together with surface water resources some other natural resources, like groundwater, soil, vegetation, and also ecosystems, to combine technical, ecological and economic approaches and least but no last integrate different economic sectors, like agriculture, water supply, industry and energy. To me one of the main failures of the IWRM and the EU/WFD is the fact that interaction with specific sectors and mainly agriculture remains very week.
In the question, if the Water-Energy-Food Nexus is a new scientific and policy paradigm, I would respond no. The WEF nexus is a specific case of the IWRM methodology, by prioritizing the three W-E-F sectors. This is OK but what we wanted to know is HOW these three elements can be handled together. The Latin word “nexus” that means a strong inter-connexion, as in the “Gordian Knot”, don’t provides any explanation of its structure. Analytically we don’t know how to model WEF and make future projections. In policy, we don’t have adequate institutions and guidelines for managing it.
In reality, if there is no prioritizationon between the three WEF components, in any particular application there are winners and losers. Maximising the food production, as in the case of Thessalia (Greece) and Guadiana (Portugal and Spain), food production becomes the winner and surface and groundwater resources, as well as energy consumption, are the losers. The NEXUS process is not sustainable because extended water scarcity under climate change may retrograde the environmental quality and jeopardise the existence of humans and terrestrial ecosystems. So what we need is a Hydro-centric-Food-Energy Integrated Management (HFEIM) approach. See
https://lupinepublishers.com/agriculture-journal/volume8-issue3.php
and a “good” water governance:
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78625-4
Since my last summary of 19th April, this Nexus Dissensus Forum has seen a burst of insightful and thought-provoking interventions from Barbara van Koppen, Simon Thuo, Luxon Nhamo, Mike Muller, Richard Meissner, Jacques Ganoulis and a cryptic one from Alan Potkin (Alan, is your critique of Khieu Samphan that he is an integrationist or a Nexus-ist, or as I perhaps understand it, is it your telling point – to my argument that nexus is also brought about by charismatic leadership – that charisma can go horribly awry?) We are now entering the final week and we hope to see more from many others as well.
Again, to brutally summarize:
IWRM has done a good job of bringing together water professionals to address global policy agenda around multi-faceted water issues. However, it has failed to go beyond national and international professionals and middle-class interests to larger multipurpose developments or to better rural successes that are facing new challenges from globalization, climate change etc.
IWRM, beginning as it does from water, does not go far enough in meeting today's evolving challenges as do more polycentric ones such as the Nexus approach, circular economy, etc. (Old joke: a man asking for directions to reach a certain place was told, "Yes, I can tell you how to get there but I would not start from here.") Nexus specifically has moved beyond conceptual discourse to tools that are useful for moving forward in a complex and intertwined world.
There exist big gaps between concepts and paradigms developed in the North and their transplanting to the Developing South via consulting services. Powerful Southern technocratic elites are quite adept at mobilizing these as social capital to push back against any meaningful change (i.e. form versus substance). Nexus (or IWRM) politics would be very different in established comfortable settings where tools such as taxation work than in fluid and unsettled politics of much of the Global South where subsidies are an easier way out.
If "integration" or Nexus is used mainly as a technical/scientific tool within a sector like water, it does provide for some success as long as WHAT to integrate is within methodological comfort zones (such as groundwater and soil moisture with agriculture). When it moves to integrate different sectors such as energy, food, urban congestion or (Heaven help us) the whole environment, things start fraying badly, particularly for those pressed with solving issues here and now on the ground.
"IT IS THE POLITICS, STUPID!"
The questions that now emerge pertain to the deployment of these concepts.
Water, energy, food each have well-entrenched and complicated supply chains from the ground to the user (for food, from the farm to the dinner table and waste bin destination). Each link of the chain is sustained by tough politics of those who stand to gain or lose massively either way, and cannot afford/have no time to take in (or listen to) elegant academic arguments. Each link in the chain is also seen as highly dysfunctional by someone outside the chain trying to deploy the Nexus or IWRM approaches.
Because of the nature of the links in the chain, one may be proposing very different politics (or policy prescriptions if you want to be polite), if one places water at the starting front as with WEF than if one placed food as with FEW. The same applies to energy. This brings us to the difficult questions of trade-offs. Nexus has gone beyond IWRM in bringing in the interests of other sectors to the fore without just privileging water, and in some cases interesting tools to clarify what trade-offs are involved. But in general, these tools still use the metrics of economic and financial valuations without much success in assessing other values such as strategic or spiritual/humanitarian concerns.
In opening up the envelope of trade-off possibilities (and the politics embedded therein), it is critical that social carriers of different values – especially those who try to speak for the socially marginalized and the environment – be not only found a place at the policy table but also responded to meaningfully. This constructive engagement is critical to determine how much and at what points each sector is a private good (profit for market individualism), public good (controlled stewardship of redistribution for bureaucratic hierarchism) or common pool good (human rights of activist egalitarianism). Trade-offs between contending values and contradictory certitudes cannot be forcibly fit into one-size shoe of money metrics. This is where nexus methodologies could clarify to a great extent, but not substitute for, political trade-offs.
Looking forward to your active participation during this last week!
Earlier I referred to the adage 'science speaking truth to power' and after seeing Dipak's post I thought to embroider on science's link with power. I often hear that science should speak truth to power especially in the context of evidence-based policy analyses. This also holds true for the WEF nexus. In 2018, I reviewed a number of articles for Frontiers in Environmental Science that investigated the operation of the nexus in several contexts. With the exception of Vivianna Wieglied's and Antje Buns's article (https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fenvs.2018.00128/full), which took an interpretivist stance as opposed to an explanatory view, the papers investigated the nexus from a mechanistic perspective with some employing models to show the interaction and necessary trade-offs between water, energy and food in a changing global climate. The articles then produced recommendations to policy makers based on their investigations and conclusions. In this way, many authors operationalised '(empirical) science speaking truth to power'.
However, and looking at Dipak's post about nexus politics, there is an instilled believe among many researchers that their work should be policy relevant and their (empirical) scientific investigations would be 'enough' to bring about policy change. I agree with Dipak that the Nexus is good at telling us 'what' to integrate but when it comes to adding more sectors to integrate in order to solve problems on the ground, it becomes much more complicated and even complex. This is because politics enters the fray. The 'what' Dipak refers to links with 'what' is possible to do from an empirical perspective. Regarding this, the Nexus has been framed instrumentally to answer the 'what': to integrate the three sectors at a grand societal scale involving governmental policy makers as the final 'customers' of empirical studies. What the empirical sciences often neglect is to judge who can act and with what right and obligations. This brings in politics as the authoritative allocation of values in society (Easton). 'Authoritative allocation' is not only the right or obligation of policy makers and politicians (the elite); non-state entities and even individuals are also 'authoritative allocators' in their own right. That said, politics is not only state or governmental power, but also the diffusion of values, defined along normative (ethical) lines, throughout society by a host of state and non-state actors.
All in all, (empirical) science is not enough to bring about meaningful change within the policy environment, because politics play a decisive role (good or bad) throughout policy processes in various contexts and dynamic issue areas. Based on this, empirical science rarely, if ever, speaks truth to power. Said differently, empirical science is not enough to inform us about the right and obligations (e.g. politics) of individuals on a daily basis operating within a nexus environment. In light of this, we also have to consider the broader political ramifications along normative lines of integrating WEF. As WEF nexus researchers, we do not only have a right and obligation towards policy makers and politicians but also a right and obligation towards the rest of society to critically engage with policy paradigms, like the WEF nexus, and highlight its normative shortcomings and often unintended consequences.
Thanks, Dipak, for noting my "cryptic" posting of a week ago on Dr. Khieu. I assumed that anyone wanting to decode my remarks could have followed the link... which would have shown that Khieu was in large part the brains behind the Khmer Rouge's WLE ("water, land and environment", presumably) agenda, although they didn't use that formulation; and following the downfall of the psychopathic Pol Pot, rose to the top of the KR politburo. I hadn't then been much involved in Cambodian enviro planning/WRM so all I knew was what we all knew: i.e., that the KR managed to murder, directly or indirectly, about a quarter of the entire country's population in a half decade... presumably towards seeking to optimize —materially and morally— WLE allocations down to the micro level. My point was that putting we, the degreed and certified experts, in absolute totalitarian command comes at considerable risk.
Even before the COVID 19 situation —in which we're all now immersed for the foreseeable future, and which has demonstrated all-too-well the limitations of degreed and certified expertise, and the extreme downsides of the over-empowerment of that class— the ascent of Trump; Brexit; the crumbling of the EU; the delegitimation of the UN (and of the Paris climate accords particularly); and in my own sphere, the obvious inability of the Mekong River Commission to effectively manage for posterity an aquatic resources system on which the nutrition of 60M riparian inhabitants depends in fair part, suggests that more finely adjusting the conceptual framework has reached the end of its string.
I used the opaque terminology, "polycentric and transformative approaches to provide cross-sectoral quantitative relationships..." introduced into our discussions here by Luxan Nhamo as exemplary expertise jargon well beyond my own abilities to unpack, although I'm getting old, and my doctoral studies date back to the 1980s.
Useful discussion and a very timely one as we are exploring different ways to implement integrated and systems-based approaches to sustainable development and food systems transformation. Nexus approach emerged also as one of the possible responses to the lack of success in the operationalization of the IWRM in practice. However, it failed to take into account one of the main lessons from experiences with IWRM that is, that achieving policy coherence and integrated planning and management is not just a techno-managerial issue, but also a deeply political one. The organization of political processes is always intrinsically messy and open-ended, something that may seem to clash with the desires of techno-managers for clean and finite causal pathways that are informed by expert knowledge.
As Francois Molle mentioned, the nexus debate was and remains helpful in attracting attention on the complex trade-offs that have to be made between sectors. However, just as in the case of IWRM, addressing governance of the nexus proved challenging. The nexus approach tends to be based on and reproduces a belief in the production of neutral information based on expert-based optimisations as the basis for policy-making. Without denying the usefulness of such information, it has to be recognized that it is rarely sufficient.
Addressing trade-offs and improving policy integration across sectors is a fundamentally political process requiring negotiation amongst different actors with distinct perceptions, interests and practices. The interplay between critical economic sectors of activity leads to complex arbitrations regarding resources allocation modalities, equity or equality of access and the inclusion of diverse stakeholders in decision making processes.
Acknowledging this prompts modesty in terms of what can be changed or improved and how fast, and being flexible, innovative and ready to adapt. Despite its limitations, the nexus approach does have a potential for innovation. Some countries are taking the concept as a basis for reflection. What makes it interesting is the fact that it does not provide a picture of an idealized scenario or image of what the sustainable and integrated resource management should look like, but emphasizes the need to understand the reality of the situation, behavior of key actors, their relationships, and how they are influenced by existing policies, strategies and plans as well as by global trends.
Where a nexus approach needs further research and development is: i) its scope – the need to prioritize the most critical cross-sectoral linkages and potential conflicts; ii) the methods that incorporate social and political context of select sectors (e.g. overlaps in institutional mandates, lack of compatibility of geographical and political scales, differences in enforcement culture, power and information imbalances, pressures from interest groups, and the cumulative effects of history); and iii) engagement of affected stakeholders and decision-makers. Without capturing the full range of societal and governance challenges related to key interlinkages and trade-offs between select sectors, decision-making processes and stakeholder behaviours, identified (technocentric and administrative) options risk remaining largely non effective, and not leading to expected improvements in resource use efficiency, sustainability and equity.
In this very interesting Water Dissensus Forum we have so far learned a lot about IWRM and the Nexus as tools for a “good” or “bad” management of water, energy and food in different socio-economic environments around the world. From a comparative analysis between the two tools, there is a general consensus about the theoretical or scientific merits of IWRM, although its capacity to embrace in the ground different environmental and social sensitivities as in developing countries and the possibility to interact with other economic sectors, such agriculture, is often put into doubt. The WEF Nexus tool is considered by definition to be a polycentric tool and the question remains if a cost-benefit analysis could put the “Food first” (FWE) or the “Water first” (WEF) in the Nexus.
This brings us, in the context of water management, to the links between Water Science, Hydro-Policy and Hydro-Governance, defining Hydro-Governance as the integration of Water Science and Policy into the Water Politics. In reality, there are big gaps between these three issues: we usually talk about the divide between Science and Policy but gaps also exist between Policy and Governance and between Science and Governance.
IWRM is following the European tradition for the legal regulation of water use, as a legacy of the ancient Roman law, and was successfully implemented, at least in Europe, for bringing together Science (the IWRM model) and Hydro-Policy (the EU-WFD). Its possible failure in integrating sectoral applications is not because of the IWRM concept but rather because of the poor connection between Hydro-Governance and Policy.
Concerning the application of cost-benefit analysis to the Nexus, water prevails because although the water pricing is generally low, its intrinsic value for human existence and ecosystems survival is infinite. The problem with the WEF is that we don’t know scientifically how to model it and how to predict future WEF evolution. This means that Governance and Policy without a strong scientific approach are unable to provide “good” water management.
In fact, from the Coronavirus Pandemic Crisis, we have learned at least two things (1) how the high pressure of human activities on Nature may have catastrophic consequences. For example, only a few weeks after reducing almost to zero economic activities in cities and coastal areas, the water in Venice’s canals became much more transparent and dolphins came close to the shoreline in Thessaloniki, my the Mediterranean home city. We can easily imagine the benefit to water resources from reducing water overuse and groundwater over-pumping or the climate change mitigation from eliminating globally millions of tons of CO2 gaseous emissions through the drastic reduction of the international and national air travel. (2) because epidemiologists don’t know how the COVIR-19 is transmitted and how we can model the pandemic contamination of populations, governments are unable to take the right decisions and every week we are witnessing contradictory decisions about the confinement, the use of masks, the opening time of schools and how to restart economic activities. This is a good demonstration that no effective governance and right policy can be implemented without a good knowledge and understanding of the situation.
Of course, from the ancient time of Athens in Greece to different political regimes that humanity has experienced, the main question prevails: “who should rule the state” and decide about Hydro-Governance? Diachronically we have got different answers: Athenians, practicing a direct involvement of all citizens in the city’s governance answered that the people’s majority, “the demos” should rule (direct democracy). Plato, the Greek philosopher has provided in the same period a simple but difficult answer: “the best” should rule. Many years later, Carl Marx asked the same question and between the “workers” and the “capitalists”, he opted for the workers. In different times and places, the army or the leading party took the power and imposed a Dictator to rule with disastrous consequences in the loss of freedom, bloodshed and violence, as in the case of Pol Pot in Cambodia. In modern democracies, with an indirect representation of citizens, many drawbacks are visible such as populism (see the Brexit issue), no respect for the rule of law (Trump politics) or poor participation in the decision-making and lack of solidarity (European Union). However, as Churchill said, democracy is the “least bad” and the issue is how we can reach a “good” democratic hydro-governance (see:
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-78625-4_8
I feel that it is important to note that in order to realistically take the nexus approach, it is essential to approach water and land use and climate from a far broader perspective than is presently generally given. This would be one in which water and land management entail carefully considering the entire global hydrological cycle and the interconnected nature of the eco-systems which maintain it.
This cycling of water is intimately linked with energy exchanges among the atmosphere, ocean, and land that determine the Earth's climate and cause much of natural climate variability. The impacts of climate change and variability on the quality of human life occur primarily through changes in the water cycle. As stated in the National Research Council's report on Research Pathways for the Next Decade(NRC, 1999):
"Water is at the heart of both the causes and effects of climate change." (NASA)
https://science.nasa.gov/earth-science/oceanography/ocean-earth-system/ocean-water-cycle
“Ensuring that ecosystems are protected and conserved is central to achieving water security – both for people and for nature. Ecosystems are vital to sustaining the quantity and quality of water available within a watershed, on which both nature and people rely. Maintaining the integrity of ecosystems is essential for supporting the diverse needs of humans, including domestic, agricultural, energy and industrial water use, and for the sustainability of ecosystems, including protecting the water-provisioning services they provide.” (U.N Analytical Brief 22/3/13)
The safeguarding of the global water cycle, through ecosystem restoration, in accordance with Target 6.6 of the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals Agenda offers a valid way for implementation.
“By 2020, protect and restore water-related ecosystems, including mountains, forests, wetlands, rivers, aquifers and lakes”
Here is a link to a Sustainable Development paper written as an input to the UN Secretary General for his 2019 SDG Report.
https://www.activeremedy.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/a.r-input-for-global-sustainable-development-report-2019.pdf
I look forwards to further discussions related to this nexus approach.
As we close this Water Alternatives Nexus Dissensus Forum, we who took part both actively and passively have definitely gained a few new insights. I must, however, admit my surprise at the large number of friends otherwise active in the IWRM/Nexus research/debates who did not enter the fray but chose to relay quite interesting views and concerns by other more personal means, i.e. emails, skype, WhatsApp etc. I will try and speculate below why as I summarize the last week.
o Since my last summary and posing further questions, new responses (Richard Meissner, Alan Potkin, Dubravka Bojic, Jacques Ganoulis and Stella Joy: thank you!) have also highlighted the centrality of politics and the need for researchers to use the Nexus approach (or IWRM) to find more effective ways to engage with it. This is particularly true in much of the Global South where politics is more fluid and less structured procedurally than in the Industrialized North and where the need for integrative approaches to resource management is perhaps more pressing.
o Like Leo Tolstoy's happy families (opening lines of his novel Anna Karenina), both Nexus and IWRM are useful tools on their own to understand the complexities of the interface between natural resources and society, whether approached from the side of water, food, energy or even major crises such as climate change and health.
o However, and again like Tolstoy's unhappy families that are unhappy in their own specific ways, both can be faulted for their reticence in tackling the 'P' worded bull by the horns, so to speak, as it makes mince-meat of well-meaning academic models and their recommendations. And until they begin to do that, their usefulness to the powers-that-be will only be ornamental, to be used for display on important occasions but to be locked away otherwise for business as usual.
o Interesting personal reactions I received during these discussions have highlighted how we are shackled by the terms we have deified and use, which blinker us to the politics underlying siloed and de-nexused real-life scenarios – words dominating water, energy and food agency narratives such as 'governance', 'best practices', 'policy makers', 'stakeholders' etc that sanitize away entrenched hegemonies and power relations.
o I will use 'stakeholders' as an example. Late Ramaswamy Iyer (possibly India's best water resources secretary) was emphatic that there is no such thing, that there are only stake-winners and stake-losers. Indeed, the term is said to come from the American Wild West where settlers drove a stake to the ground to claim for private homesteading what was Native American common pool open prairie, as big a land grab as any in history. Cultural Theorist Michael Thompson tells me there is an even older history to the term: in pre-paper currency Britain, gamblers gave their purse of wager coins to someone having NO stake in the game to hold and to give to the winner (thus preventing the loser from having second thoughts). This is the exact opposite of the meaning it has today and which does not hide the underlying power politics as current usage does.
o Has IWRM and now Nexus become unwitting prisoners of corralled thinking when they do not unpack the politics of justice, vested interests and hegemonies behind such defining terms? Can one put a village landlord and the village landless serf in the same room and claim, as development agencies do, to have held a successful "stakeholder meeting"?
o Indeed, what is becoming apparent is that there are no homogeneous and monochrome "stakeholders" in the Nexus debate, only contending social solidarities of market individualism, bureaucratic hierarchism and activist egalitarianism in each link of the Nexus chains. They each deploy different types of power (i.e. politics or "policy" which is nothing but a formula for the use of power one has): persuasive, coercive or moral respectively. So far both IWRM and Nexus researchers have not found a way to model those driving values that over-ride mere monetary or legal/procedural/administrative metrics.
Nexus and IWRM are both here to stay, albeit much being dependent on how their practioners face the varied political challenges ahead. Indeed, judging by how many new Nexus networks are popping up and finding significant grant backings for their efforts in Europe and America, we can be sure that the debates will be more ebullient and boisterous in the days ahead. And those of us who took part in this Nexus Dissensus Forum will be going away a bit richer in questions if not answers that will enrich our research activities in the years ahead.
I am grateful, and thank you all on behalf of Water Alternatives and its editors/moderators/logistics managers.
This posting attracted fewer comments than the previous one, an issue that Dipak addresses in his wrap-up comment. Nevertheless, it did inspire a lively and interesting discussion from which I hope others learned as much as I did. The "elephant in the room" is what Dipak calls the "P" word. Politics. For many technical-minded people this conjures all kinds of negative images. It is certainly messy and all too often leads to outcomes that are neither optimal by any objective measure or just. However, having lively active political processes, even those flawed by uneven power distribution, is better than the opposite. That said, it also suggests we need far more effort to reform political processes to make them fairer and to increase the likelihood that science drives complex decisions. Nexus analysis like IWRM remain important as tools to understand systems and improve forecasting on how specific interventions are likely to play out.
I want to thank Dipak for his willingness to put his ideas forward, possibly at some political risk, and for his even-handed and constructive responses to the diverse comments. And thank you all those who did comment.
The next discussion will begin soon--stay tuned!