Financial Challenges of the Nexus // Pathways for Investment in Water, Energy and Agriculture in the Arab World

By Martin Keulertz and Eckart Woertz. The Water–Energy–Food (WEF) nexus is a development challenge in the Arab world, particularly in the ‘core nexus countries’ with low to mid-incomes in which limited water endowments permit agricultural production, such as Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia, Lebanon, Algeria, Sudan and Jordan. The WEF nexus is often conceptualized in mere technocratic terms, yet politics matter in the implementation of projects that address it. Internalizing hydrological externalities or leaving them as they are and financing them as a public good requires states whose capacities have been reduced as a result of neoliberal reform.