ABSTRACT
Humans cannot survive without food, water, and energy, with water and food in particular understood as basic needs and a human right (Knox 2014). Whilst they may be afforded an economic value, they are also essential to life and thus their value transcends economic value alone. Indeed, when examining different water-related conflicts such as with many dam projects around the world, protagonists approach the issue from very different value premises with little common ground between them. Hydrocracies promoting the dam argue for benefits from the sale of electricity, while activists protesting the project see it as destroying natural habitats as well as sacred sites of indigenous communities upon which no monetary value can be placed or trade-off considered. It is precisely this additional complexity that arises as diverse concerns interact, and which is what the nexus approach is all about, that ethical concerns come into play and cannot be ignored. Indeed, Hilary Putnam (2005) describes ethics as “concerned with the solution of practical problems, guided by mutually supporting but not fully reconcilable concerns”. He further argues that these concerns come with real-life tensions that will not yield to a simple ethics “as a noble statue standing atop a single pillar”. He prefers, much like a good nexus approach protagonist though without being a part of the nexus debate, to see it as a table with many legs, which wobbles a lot on an uneven surface, but is very hard to turn over.
