Energy and water are vital services to be provided to all communities for their persistence. For the entire human history, significant inputs and efforts have been invested to secure the services, and the size of the costs is increasing as the related resources is getting scarce. Water and energy have been included in the development goals of most of the societies in human history. In both areas, the ultimate goal is the same, which is to provide water and energy for the development of the society, but the circumstances surrounding the policy goals are different, and, therefore, the ways of policymaking vary.
The nexus perspective provides various opportunities for enhancing synergetic solutions between the systems in which the resources and activities are organized to produce final services for the community. Given the increasing understanding of the inter-connectedness between the systems, conventional perspectives dealing with the systems separately would not be seen as effective even from each system itself, as well as from the sustainability aspect of the community.
A number of recent studies have emphasized the significant roles of the energy-water nexus, but institutional and policy dimensions of the nexus have not dealt with significantly. The purpose of this paper A Study on Policy Directions for the Water-Food-Energy Nexus is twofold: (i) to identify the nexus interactions between water and energy system, and various nexus-based solutions that can address sectoral issues in both systems, (ii) to develop possible institutional arrangements, including public intervention, that can support the adoption of nexus approaches when they can enhance sustainability and resource security of each component systems.