ABSTRACT
The thrust of nexus thinking is that understanding the causes and implications of resource extraction and consumption require thinking across boundaries of resource categories. The potential pitfalls of expanding the methodological ambit in such ways, however, are significant. Among these pitfalls is that collapsing boundaries renders the questions about resources and environments impossibly complicated and therefore difficult to model, visualize, and communicate. Of course such challenges are not new in scientific inquiry and governance, and there are many possible ways to constrain inquiries so that problems can be semi-isolated for the purposes of understanding them or attempting to govern them. The concept of scale is inherent to nexus thinking and necessary for any fruitful nexus-based analysis. Each nexus dimension – from water to energy to food – crosses scales.
