Towards a governance heuristic for sustainable development

• Nexus thinking: integrated resource governance for sustainable development.
• Soil, water and biodiversity are intrinsically linked systems. Their ecosystem services are most visibly manifested in local contexts.
• Nexus thinking requires spatial reference points — applying a landscape lens.
• Landscapes with local interdependencies — distant drivers of local resource systems.
• Nexus governance processes as a priority for sustainable and socially just development.

The year 2015 is setting the course for a joint global vision for sustainable development. UN member states are in the process of jointly adopting the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), a list of targets that are the political expression of a global understanding of what is needed to achieve sustainable development on a planetary scale. This comprehensive list covers very different human activities from the eradication of poverty and hunger to access to modern forms of energy and sustainable production and consumption patterns. When assessing the natural resource basis that is needed to achieve the SDGs, analyses reveal that they contain competing demands and critical trade-offs. Identifying these demands and trade-offs and synergies is at the core of nexus thinking. And understanding them in the context of finite resources is essential to developing pathways for integrated and socially just governance processes.