With the growing concern in respect of climate change and its impact from the 1990s, scientists also had to acknowledge the social dimension of the problem.
After alarming reports like the Club of Rome’s “Limits to Growth”, or the Brundtland report “Our common future”, the world became increasingly aware of the existential importance of global environmental change and sustainability. With the pioneering works of Holling, a whole set of questions gained importance from the early 1970s concerning such issues as environmental stability and change, disturbance and resilience, and sustainability transitions. Other intellectual forerunners of nexus thinking come from the huge body of ecosystem studies. Landscape ecology still has its place in physical geography, despite its rather vague definition of landscapes as research objects. It later became influential in the study of complex relationships between ecological processes in physical landscapes. There is, for example, the school of landscape ecology that was established in the mid-20th century. It is evident that nexus thinking follows the tradition of other schools of thought circling around connectedness, mutual relationships, and interaction in the regional context of water use. When the nexus approach was presented at the World Economic Forum as a new conceptual framework for water resources management, it was not explicitly mentioned that its origins are quite a bit older, and that its key idea is neither unique nor particularly sophisticated. In conclusion, the paper calls for a “nexus-plus” perspective that is more sensitive to the historical and cross-scalar embeddedness of hydro-development, and which enables more inclusive and fair governance of scarce resources. And third, it emphasizes the importance of asymmetric power structures to explain the dynamics of hydro-developments and their social consequences. Second, it takes a cross-scalar perspective to explain how local land use is influenced by regional and global drivers. First, it views time and temporality as essential aspects of change and calls for a more systematic recognition of the historical context out of which development trajectories and current nexus situations have emerged.
The paper explores socio-ecological transformations along the analytical dimensions of time, scale, and power. The empirical findings follow the historical stages of the scheme and their physical outcomes, which affected much more than just water, energy, and food. The empirical material comes from a case study of the Fincha-Amerti-Neshe scheme that was implemented in three consecutive stages over almost half a century, combining dams, hydro-power plants, large-scale sugar cane plantations, and a factory for sugar production. Based on critical theoretical debates and extensive field research in Ethiopia, the paper broadens the nexus perspective by integrating the three analytical dimensions of time, space, and power. The article takes hydro-development schemes in the Upper Blue Nile Basin of Ethiopia as an example to discuss the suitability and shortcomings of nexus approaches for the analysis of complex socio-ecological transformations.
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