article · Geoforum
Conventional water-energy-food nexus frameworks often overlook political and lived realities on the ground. Drawing on heterogeneous infrastructure studies and political ecology, research examining three cases across Sub-Saharan Africa shows how communities actively shape resource systems. Individuals and groups access, maintain, or disrupt connected infrastructure through varied practices, including improvisation, tinkering, intermediate decentralised technologies, unauthorised connections, and collective self-empowerment. These everyday interventions reveal that nexus systems are not static technical arrangements, but are continuously constructed and altered over time. The findings challenge standardised, one-size-fits-all models by illustrating that resource access is uneven, complex, and plural. Examining the nexus through local practices and human agency highlights key leverage points needed to address deep-seated resource insecurities and support fairer resource distribution.
Global policies often treat water, energy, and food systems as purely technical issues, ignoring how real communities navigate basic needs. Showing how people adapt and modify local infrastructure provides decision-makers with a grounded understanding of resource security. Recognising these everyday realities helps planners design more equitable interventions that work alongside local initiatives rather than against them.
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In recent years, the water-energy-food nexus gained traction in science and policy debates to address the relationships between water, energy and food sectors. Inspired by Political Ecology thinking, we advocate for a nexus understanding that acknowledges the political nature of the concept and points to lived and experienced nexus realities. We draw on literature from heterogeneous infrastructures, giving attention to the socio-material entanglements that configure a nexus dynamically over time and space. We substantiate our conceptual arguments based on three different cases from Sub-Saharan Africa, that reveal the ways in which people access, maintain or disrupt infrastructure that links water, energy, and food systems. This may occur through practice forms of tinkering or improvisation of infrastructural components, intermediate (decentralised) technologies, through theft, or through some form of self-empowerment. Methodologically, the role of practices is emphasized as they help to understand Nexus heterogeneity and disparate forms of agency to (re-)configure a nexus. The findings demonstrate that the nexus is not just there but is constantly in-the-making. Practices stabilise, build, or alter differentiated nexus configurations within uneven nexus in/securities. Moreover, this article disrupts a “one-size-fits-all” nexus concept by offering a nuanced understanding of nexus realities that are more complex, heterogeneous, and plural than commonly described. Our analysis shows that re-thinking the nexus by focusing on people and practices draws the attention towards agency and change – and thus enables to identify leverage themes rendering a more just nexus.
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DOI: 10.1016/j.geoforum.2022.05.007
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