ABSTRACT
The problem with global crises is that the dominant hegemonic thinking tends to gravitative towards an urgent and singular solution, compatible with the hegemonic cosmology and ignoring or downplaying other possibilities. This is what happened in the case of “the nexus” in 2008, when the World Economic Forum (WEF), pushed by major multinational businesses, 1 proposed “the nexus” based on a particular scarcity narrative. The WEF’s nexus approach, later reproduced and diffused by other global and regional actors, strongly emphasised demand-led technological and market solutions that downplayed or ignored supply-side limits together with the political dimensions that shape control over and access to resources. The nexus discourse and language diffused globally, including in South and South East Asia, although it is competing with other water–food–energy related concepts such as Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) (Allouche 2016).
