ABSTRACT
Issues of rights and justice have been neglected in debates about the water–food–energy nexus. Globally, the ongoing industrial-scale commodification of water, energy, and land “from above” (cf. Hall, Hirsch, & Li 2011) is producing complex and profound agrarian changes. For people living in rural places, these forces can create highly disruptive, multiple enclosures, and destabilising exclusions (Barney 2007; 2009; Bernstein 2010). Smallholders frequently experience rapid and negative impacts as various resources upon which their livelihoods depend are grabbed, diminished, or degraded. Furthermore, these impacts are cumulative as they act across multiple nexused resources and are important as farmers are also at the same time fishers, forest users, and hunter-gatherers, reflecting the often diverse livelihoods of local people – based on everyday use of multiple resources – that crucially connects aquatic and terrestrial environments (e.g. Baird & Barney 2017; Roberts 2015). The linkages and connections are generally under-recognised, by private developers, international development agencies, governments, and researchers, as this involves paying close attention to what Batterbury (2001: 441) terms the “micro-politics of livelihood decision-making”, in particular places and communities. Such cumulative impacts are now shaping the character of contemporary agrarian transitions.
