Can buzzwords create infrastructures? Reflecting on the Water-Energy-Food Nexus approach

Over the past few decades, the increasing pressures on water, energy and food have widened social inequalities and furthered environmental damage. The scholarship on the Water-Energy-Food Nexus (WEF Nexus) has responded with policy-oriented interdisciplinary research on modelling the use of environmental resources. While the WEF Nexus covers some elements of complexity, it has been critiqued by social scientists for ignoring questions of power and justice. On the other hand, the WEF Nexus has succeeded in mobilising funding and the attention of policymakers. How have sustainability researchers used the ‘WEF Nexus’ buzzword to engage with complexity and what are the underlying capabilities required to support this engagement?

While current reviews of the WEF Nexus research focus on methodologies for integration and optimisation, we examine nexus research as an interdisciplinary practice, contingent on capabilities and politics. As such, we show how the WEF Nexus programme engaged with the notion of complexity, while acknowledging the notions of power and justice. We argue that the WEF Nexus buzzword was successful in building cognitive capabilities for researching complexity by giving researchers the flexibility to reconceptualise it as well as the freedom to assemble novel configurations of teams. However, the time-limited nature of the hype around the Nexus meant that researchers and programme leads were less able to translate their research agendas into transgressive, political action. This was particularly visible in the case of early career and overseas scholars who did not have the pre-existing ‘backstage’ capabilities, i.e. networks, access to relevant software or domain-specific knowledge.