The ‘Nexus’ as a Step Back Towards a More Coherent Water Resource Management Paradigm

This paper locates the emergence of the ‘water-food-energy nexus’ discourse as a step in the progression of the ‘development versus environment’ debate, which came into focus at the 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The dominant water management paradigm after Rio was not the approach of Agenda 21, the Rio Programme of Action (UNCED, 1992) but loosely based on the outcome of the Dublin International Conference on Water and the Environment (ICWE, 1992).