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the hub of WEF experimentation due to innovation and polycentric governance
(with an active and informed civil society constellation of NGOs and social
movements, often in collaboration, occasionally in con
ict with formal state
institutions that
themselves were not
impervious to change and new ways of
thinking).
Water for food production has required signi
cant investments in infrastructure
(dams, canals, conveyance systems) that, with the advent of pumping technology,
has been developed to the detriment of landscapes re-plumbed as a result. Food
production was not necessarily the ultimate imperative; it was also the settlement of
lands as in the western United States, the domination of territory and subjugation of
local populations as in British famine relief initiatives in colonial India. Much of
this goes back to the Wittfogel hydraulic society hypothesis whereupon the ability
to control water allowed for the control of food supply, population, settlements,
society and the environment (for reviews, see Wescoat
2000
; and Wescoat and
Halvorson
2000
).
Indeed in some cases, water requirements for energy production compete with
water requirements for food production. Recently in the United States, the diver-
sions of freshwater for electrical power plant cooling exceeded the diversions of
fresh water for irrigation. Is energy the
'
'
driving the WEF Nexus? Energy
resource extraction has rising environmental and social costs, with commercial
interests driving voracious resource extraction and depletion. The private sector
feigns
wild card
; the allure of mobile and often fugitive foreign direct
investment can lead to a blind eye on national and regional regulation of energy
development. With its transportability and commodi
'
ungovernability
'
cation, energy exhibits a
fundamental contradistinction to water as an
'
uncooperative commodity
'
(Bakker
2003
); the capturability, resource-use exclusion and commodi
cation dimensions of
energy make it fundamentally different than water, which is increasingly subject to
ethical claims of water as human right and water as public good.
2.1 Dynamics of the Water-Energy-Food Nexus
Over the course of a decade and a half working with the nexus in South Asia, the
Americas and Europe, it has become evident to us that the term
can have
negative implications, as in various nexus manifestations involving crime (Mears
2001
), corruption (Phy
2010
), etc. In the Roman Republic,
'
nexus
'
'
nexus
'
was a bond
debt bondage contract.
4
This belies the benign complexity
that is intended by our use of the term and instead casts doubt by simplifying the
nexus as subterfuge.
Furthermore, by placing the nexus in the resource security context, which we
have done (Scott et al.
2013
; Wescoat and Halvorson
2012
) along with numerous
slave serving a
'
nexum
'
4
See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nexum
for more information.
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