The water-food-energy Nexus - Realising a new paradigm

•The water-food-energy Nexus is a new approach for sustainability-directed research.•Development investments are increasingly required to consider Nexus trade-offs.•We present a holistic framework for the analysis of Nexus trade-offs.•A dynamic, sectorally balanced Nexus framework can reveal new systems understanding.•In the Mekong region, this framework detected policy-relevant system criticalities.

SummaryThe water-food-energy Nexus has emerged as a new perspective in debates concerned with balancing potentially conflicting sectoral imperatives of large scale development investments concerned with energy, water or food security. Current frameworks are partial as they largely represent a water-centric perspective. Our hypothesis is that a dynamic Nexus framework that attempts to equally weight sectoral objectives provides a new paradigm for diagnosis and investigation. Dynamic refers here to explicitly understanding (or a diagnosis of) the dynamic relationships and ripple effects whereas static-comparative refers to a comparison of states before and after change. This paper proposes a balanced Nexus framework and presents results from an application to the Mekong basin. The analysis identified the advantages of a sectorally balanced, dynamic Nexus approach, in particular the ability to reveal either the emergence of cross-sectoral connections, or changes in those connections, as a consequence of single sector interventions.