Summary Paper: ‘Governance and Management of the Nexus: Structures and Institutional Capacities’

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 communication; and 3. Removing subsidies or seeking the ‘right price’ for domestic resources vis à vis international markets is not always useful; rather the first imperative is to gauge current and future costs at the national scale.