The Water-Energy-Food Nexus: Enhancing Adaptive Capacity to Complex Global Challenges - Governing the Nexus: Water, Soil and Waste Resources Considering Global Change - page 14

the more target-oriented Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) (Sachs 2012 ). We
are confronted by a series of challenges to the resilience of the global social-eco-
logical system. At the same time, we are developing and re

ning an expanding array

of capabilities to understand and in uence the complex dynamics of coupled sys-

tems. This places society at a crossroads: Follow the past decades path of resource

exploitation and social inequality, or usher in a new world order premised on plan-
etary resilience (Rockstr

'

m et al. 2009 ; National Research Council 1999 ).
A global transition of such sweeping importance has been extremely dif

ö

cult to
initiate for reasons of path dependence in political systems; economic models that
permit accumulation at the expense of depletion; degradation and dispossession
(largely outside the remit of regulation); and the precarious condition of ecosystems
in a range of contexts globally that provide fewer and more riskier survival options
for billions of the world flexibility to innovate and adapt.

Yet the transition has begun, founded on a series of understandings that are rooted
in holistic systems thinking, driven by new conceptions and lifestyle choices of a
growing number of the world

' s poor, thus allowing little

s youth fatigued by status quo arrangements, and
crucially, aided by an emerging set of tools that permit citizens, community groups,
organizations and policymakers to actuate adaptive responses to the drivers of
global change. Among these tools are integrated approaches to resource use that
emphasize longer-term social and ecological sustainability while offering opera-
tional means to internalize externalities, foresee and mitigate unintended conse-
quences, and above all, strengthen resilience through outcome-oriented open
learning and institutional change. This is a tall order, and while speci

'

c transition

pathways that often emerge gradually must be seized rapidly, the conceptual

development and tools application processes have bene tted from a decade or more

of innovation and experimentation.
Enter the of multiple resources, linked in turn to management and policy

frameworks, and embedded in broader political processes. The nexus conceptually
links multiple resource-use practices and serves paradigmatically to understand
interrelations among such practices that were previously considered in isolation.
Here we will demonstrate that resource recovery is at the core of operationalizing
the nexus. This is fundamentally different

' nexus '

ciency and productivity,
although nexus practices can be seen in terms of deriving increased output from
limited resources.

from ef

1.1 The Nexus Approach: The Antecedents

It is instructive here to provide a historical review of the resource nexus. When,
where and how did it emerge? Who supports and who opposes nexus frameworks
and for what reasons? Indeed, how are multiple nexus 1 construed, interlinked or

1

Etymologically and linguistically, nexus is both the singular and the plural form.