Designing public agencies for 21st century water–energy–food nexus complexity: The case of Natural Resources Wales
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/0952076720921444 |
| Published date | 01 October 2022 |
| Date | 01 October 2022 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
Designing public
agencies for 21st century
water–energy–food
nexus complexity:
The case of Natural
Resources Wales
Nick A Kirsop-Taylor
1
and
Adam P Hejnowicz
2
1
Politics Department, University of Exeter, UK
2
Department of Biology, University of York, UK
Abstract
Public environmental organisations face a Herculean task: to be responsive to public
and executive expectations for decentralisation, integration, increasing accountabilities
and efficiency savings plus, contemporaneously, managing increasingly complex nature–
society systems as exemplified by the water–energy–food nexus. The public-agency
innovation literatures and contingency theory offer par tial explanations for this chal-
lenge. However, this article, which sits at the intersection of public administration and
organisational theory, proposes a new analytical framework for framing public-agency
responses to nexus complexity. It first outlines the framework and then tests it on the
case of Natural Resources Wales, the Welsh national natural environment agency. This
case identifies six distinct innovations that have adopted to meet complex nexus pres-
sures. This leads us to characterise the case as an example of a multi-scalar, hybrid,
adhocratic organisation designed to meet nexus challenges. These findings have wider
impact for the international community of public agencies with socio-environmental
remits facing similar nexus pressures and challenges in the 21st century.
Keywords
Ecosystem approach, sustainable management of natural resources, Wales, water–
energy–food nexus
Corresponding author:
Nick A Kirsop-Taylor, Politics Department, University of Exeter, Penryn, Cornwall TR10 9FE, UK.
Email: N.A.Kirsop-Taylor@exeter.ac.uk
Public Policy and Administration
!The Author(s) 2020
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DOI: 10.1177/0952076720921444
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2022, Vol. 37(4) 410–430
Kirsop-Taylor and Hejnowicz 411
Introduction
Society faces many pressing and wide ranging local and global environmental
sustainability challenges including climate change, biodiversity loss, air and
water pollution and rapid urbanisation to name but a few (Steffen et al., 2018;
Tittensor et al., 2014; UN-HABITAT, 2016). These issues are highly complex,
frequently context dependent and often seemingly intractable, with their genesis
and persistence involving multiple overlapping social, economic, political, histor-
ical and environmental drivers of change that operate within nested social–ecolog-
ical systems (Sterner et al., 2019). The water–energy–food (WEF) nexus represents
one particular framing of these issues that keenly exemplifies these complexities
(Cairns and Krzywoszynsk, 2016), describing highly inter-connected cross-sectoral
systems (e.g. natural, human, built capital) that range over a number of socially
and ecologically influential policy domains such as agriculture, land and water
basin management and energy production and provision (Albrecht et al., 2018;
Zhang et al., 2018). The ‘nexus’ is not just a physical description of a ‘system’;
however, but also a critical conceptual approach (or lens) to appraise challenges
and problems from an integrated and holistic perspective (Weitz et al., 2017;
Wiegleb and Bruns, 2018). As such, the nexus represents a suite of multi-layered
biophysical, socio-economic and governance systems and ways of thinking that
demonstrate core properties of complex systems such as non-linear dynamics,
feedbacks, emergence, self-organisation and uncertainty (Endo et al., 2018;
Mobus and Kalton, 2014; Pahl-Wostl, 2019).
Implementing and coordinating governance activities across these complex
nexus systems falls largely to national governments and ‘environmental’ public
agencies (George and Schillebeeckx, 2018; Head, 2018; Wiegleb and Bruns,
2018). In the face of overwhelming evidence describing the seriousness of the
global climate and environmental crisis (D
ıaz et al., 2019; Masson-Delmotte
et al., 2019), national governments have started to consider more acutely the inter-
national and domestic problems and challenges of dealing with complex nexus
systems. This dynamic is evidenced by the growing number of nations increasingly
engaging with global environmental governance through international agreements,
such as the Paris Climate Agreement and the Sustainable Development Goals (e.g.
UN, 2020). At national-level, whilst this has been slow to occur, in the UK for
instance, there has been some movement by government to respond accordingly
through attempting to develop more systemic policy responses aligned towards
nexus issues (UK Government, 2019). Nevertheless, it is frequently the smaller
semi-autonomous environmental public agencies that are the key actors responsi-
ble for ensuring the delivery and implementation of the complex management and
governance of these nexus systems (George and Schillebeeckx, 2018). For example
the nexus project at the French national environment agency ADEME (Debizet
et al., 2014).
Arguably, environmental public agencies have always had to deal with the com-
plexity of managing complex social–ecological systems but have frequently done so
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