Água negra (black water) and overwhelming details: for more-than-nexus approaches to global water-energy-food challenges

This paper advances multidisciplinary research, policy, education and activisms which cohere around the concept of the ‘Water-Energy-Food (W-E-F) nexus’ via an evidence-led critique of normative forms of nexus-thinking which draws upon research with 3,705 diverse young people’s (aged 10-24 years) water-energy-food experiences in SE Brazil. We consider how the neat, cool, ostensibly authoritative buzzword style of W-E-F nexus-thinking is radically unsettled – and sometimes conceptually-critically overwhelmed – via encounters with social scientific data in practice. In particular, the paper presents two interlinked analyses of data relating to young people’s everyday engagements with water resources. First, we present a quantitative analysis of young people’s everyday participation with/in water resources, highlighting diversities and inequities in relation to age, gender, ethnicity and social class, among other modes of social-cultural heterogeneity and intersectionality. Second, we present a qualitative narration of young people’s water-related anxieties, evidencing their intimate everyday interrelations with watery materialities and insecurities – ‘black water’, ‘muddy water’, ‘shit water’ and all. In so doing, we advance an argument for what we term more-than-nexus-thinking: i.e. forms of research, theory and practice which value the apparent conceptual-ethical clarity and interoperability of nexus-thinking, whilst actively thinking-with complexities and deeply-affecting lived experiences of water-energy-food in everyday spaces.