The nexus as a political commodity: agricultural development, water policy and elite rivalry in Egypt

Thinking of the interconnections between water, food, energy and climate is nothing new in the Nile Basin; it has long been anchored in political struggles. For 200 years, Egypt's political economy has been defined by water use patterns and food security strategies that debunk the technocratic myth that rapid growth, interaction with global markets and technological modernization eliminate poor governance practices and allocative inefficiencies. In contrast, the prism of the nexus as a political commodity illuminates one of modern Egypt's most consequential dialectics: the interaction between the very particular nexus at the heart of the country's political economy, forged through factional strife and sustained by outside discourses and interests, and the economic and ecological ravages of this elite politics. Egyptian history serves as a warning. Today's conversation needs to be deconstructed in terms of how different forms of interconnectivity between water, energy and food are produced and experienced by different social groups. It reminds us to take interconnections not as given, but rather as contested and contestable outcomes from which opportunities for adaptation and transformation do not naturally emerge, but need to be struggled for.