Governance in the Water-Energy-Food Nexus: Insights from Integrative Environmental Governance

The “Water-Energy-Food Nexus” has gained the attention of policy-makers and academics as an approach that could improve ecosystem sustainability, resource efficiency and equitable access by accounting for inter-sectoral interactions in the allocation of water, energy and food (land) resources. The governance landscape and the rules that dictate how the decisions and policies that influence the allocation of resources are made are critical to the outcomes of such an approach. Despite this, governance has gained relatively little attention in Water-Energy-Food Nexus research and the concept has rarely been connected with the extensive literature on integrative environmental governance. This paper makes that link. The paper first reviews the role ascribed to governance in Water-Energy-Food Nexus literature, which suggests an emphasis on the coordinating role of governance and an assumption that ensuring policy coherence between policy objectives, identifying synergies and trade-offs and adapting existing governance arrangements will avoid unintended consequences on other sectors. The literature further suggests potential barriers to policy coherence, including the mismatch between the scope of the challenge and the institutions that handle it; the sectors’ different institutional frameworks and diverging interests; the politics that surround trade-offs; and a lack of strategic clarity, distribution of power and capability across sectors and institutions. It further proposes some options for overcoming these barriers including cross-sector cooperation and communication; dialogue platforms or interagency mechanisms; sharing of best practice with regards to integration; a stronger focus on the actors and their perceptions and interests; collaborative agreements; political economy analysis; better understanding of the supply risks and the use of economic instruments. However, while noting these desirable outcomes, potential barriers and options for addressing them, the literature provides only limited insight as to their dynamics; why they might look the way they do or how one could act upon them. Such dynamics have been explored in depth by various complementary perspectives on integrative environmental governance (including EPI; inter-organizational relations; integrated management and landscape governance; policy mixes and smart regulation; groups of regimes; institutional interaction and management; meta-governance and orchestration), and the paper proceeds to draw out and apply the key insights from these. The literature on integrative environmental governance brings valuable perspectives and offers ways to jointly and gradually improve coherence and guide decision-making in the Water-Energy-Food nexus towards the desirable outcomes. However, it also highlights that a critical lens on integration and coherence is needed to achieve these outcomes and that the normative dimensions of the Water-Energy-Food Nexus concept merit further attention. The Water-Energy-Food Nexus cannot be understood in isolation to neither the wider political economy that surrounds it nor to the respective sector interests. The Water-Energy-Food Nexus approach and the projects being implemented with this lens present opportunity to empirically test and further explore the theoretical propositions made in the literature on integrative environmental governance. In enabling such analysis, the paper ends by sketching an analytical framework for exploring governance issues pertaining to the Water-Energy-Food Nexus in a way that reflects the more comprehensive view on governance that the paper’s conclusions call for.