Jeremy Schmidt: The Financialization of the Water-Energy-Food-Climate Nexus

World Water Day takes place on 22 March: make time to read 2009 Foundation scholar Jeremy Schmidt’s latest article, “From state to system: Financialization and the water-energy-food-climate nexus,” published on 1 March 2018 in Geoforum. Schmidt’s article showed how, since the 2008 global financial crisis, the way we talk about water governance has shifted from state-centred to globally interconnected models – so much so that the water-energy-food nexus is now one of the most prominent aspects of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals. At the same time, global financial networks are increasingly using this nexus to stem economic risks and open new channels for wealth accumulation. Schmidt and his co-author Nathanial Matthews warned that these financialized approaches to water governance leave critical issues of ethics and justice unaddressed.

Jeremy Schmidt is a 2009 Trudeau scholar and assistant professor of human geography at Durham University. Read his article here (free access until 28 April 2018).