review · Sustainability
Water, energy, and food nexus research across Africa has expanded significantly since 2013, shifting from isolated sectoral studies toward interconnected systems thinking. Key emerging subfields within this body of work include modelling and optimisation, climate variability, ecosystem services sustainability, and sustainable livelihoods. Research development has evolved across interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary domains, integrating environmental, socio-economic, and political factors to support the Sustainable Development Goals. Despite this intellectual growth, an operational disconnect persists between academic research outputs and governance processes. Bridging this gap requires integrative environmental governance frameworks and transdisciplinary collaborations that unite researchers and practitioners around real-world use. Ultimately, greater coordination is needed across the continent to effectively translate theoretical nexus thinking into operational practice.
Managing water, energy, and food resources holistically is critical for sustainable development and climate resilience across Africa. Identifying how scholarship is evolving and where it disconnects from governance helps researchers, planners, and policymakers coordinate strategies more effectively, ensuring that academic insights translate into integrated, real-world solutions for essential resource security.
The work represents early-stage conceptual and bibliometric research rather than a direct commercial technology. However, the identified growth in modelling and optimisation points to potential decision-support tools for resource managers, infrastructure planners, and government agencies. Because a pronounced gap currently exists between academic outputs and governance processes, practical applications remain at an early collaborative research stage rather than near-market deployment.
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Notwithstanding the dispersed nature of the water, energy and food (WEF) nexus scholarship in the African continent, its strategic importance to the African agenda has gained widespread attention in research and planning circles. In this regard, the bibliometric science mapping and content analysis of the WEF nexus scientific publication trends, the conceptual, intellectual and social structures, as well as the inherent paradigmatic shifts in the WEF nexus body of knowledge in the African continent have been undertaken, using the nexus body of literature accessed from the Web of Science and Scopus core collection databases. The review results confirmed that, whilst the WEF nexus scholarship has expanded since 2013, there is also evidence of growth in the conceptual, intellectual and social structures of the WEF nexus in the African continent. These shifts have resulted in the emergence of hot topics (subfields) including modelling and optimization, climate variability and change, environmental ecosystem services sustainability, and sustainable development and livelihoods. The review further determined that these structures have evolved along two main perspectives of WEF nexus research development, i.e., the interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary domains. In support of the interpretation of the visual analytics of the intellectual structure and changing patterns of the WEF nexus research, the shifts in positivist, interpretivist and pragmatic paradigmatic perspectives (these are underpinned by the ontology, epistemology, and methodology and methods) are considered when explaining WEF nexus research shifts: (a) From the unconnected silo paradigms that focus on water, energy and food (security concerns) to interconnected (and sometimes interdependent or nested) linkages or systems incorporating environmental, social-economic and political drivers (also viewed as subfields) in a bid to holistically support the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) across the African continent; and (b) in the evaluation of the WEF nexus scholarship based on novel analytical approaches. We contend that whilst the theories of science change underpin this apparent expansion, the macro-economic theory will find use in explaining how the WEF nexus research agenda is negotiated and the Integrative Environmental Governance (IEG) is the duly suited governance theory to bridge the inherent disconnect between WEF nexus output and governance processes uncovered in the literature. Overall, operational challenges and opportunities of the WEF nexus abound, transitioning the WEF nexus research to practice in Africa, motivating the need to take advantage of the scholar–practitioner research underpinnings, as contemplated in the transdisciplinary research approach, which is characterised by the dual quest for new knowledge and considerations of use. Yet, there is need for more coordinated and collaborative research to achieve impact and transition from WEF nexus thinking to WEF nexus practice.
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DOI: 10.3390/su13041762
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