ABSTRACT
Integrated natural resources management is a widely researched field of study but remains a profoundly complicated area of practice. Yet, the rationale behind the idea is difficult to deny. Integration between sectors can yield multiple benefits, such as shared mechanisms to promote common knowledge, flexibility of ideas and perspectives, building trust and social learning to create adaptive, innovative and improved management decisions. In the last decade, the water-energy-food security nexus (the WEF nexus) has been promoted as a conceptual framework to optimise integration predominantly with the interrelations of these resource sectors. By providing the scope to talk about interlinkages, the nexus opens up the space to better consider natural resources interdependencies and explore coordinate decisions across sectors; in sum, go beyond conventional policy and decision making in silos. Capacity building can be a mechanism (or a tool) to move the dial from theory to practical application of the WEF and map out the path between the diversity of knowledge and local conditions to galvanise the actions necessary to address complex environmental issues. Our findings demonstrate that building collaboration in different contexts is fraught with obstacles. It is vital that the WEF must be able to change and flex across levels for it to have any practical application across the world.
