EPIC Talks: Climate Action, WEF Nexus, and Governance in East Africa

On 4 May 2026, EPIC Africa Research Network (EARN) hosted a webinar on water-energy-food (WEF) nexus governance and climate action in East Africa. The session brought together participants from across Africa and Europe to examine how national climate commitments align with regional development priorities and how governance tools can support cross-sectoral coordination in practice. Two speakers presented: Tumaini John, a PhD candidate at IHE Delft and the University of KwaZulu-Natal, who discussed linkages between NDCs, National Adaptation Plans (NAPs), and development planning in the Lake Victoria Basin; and Erik Laes of VITO, who presented a recently published WEF nexus governance analysis method applied to Kenya’s Tana River Basin. Some highlights from the session are below.

When Climate Commitments and Development Pull in Different Directions

Tumaini John opened with a direct question: Are nationally determined contributions (NDCs) linked to how water, energy, and food resources are managed in practice? Drawing on research across the riparian states of the Lake Victoria Basin, Burundi, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania, and Uganda, home to approximately 210 million people, he found that the answer is largely no. Governments in the region are simultaneously expanding agriculture, building energy infrastructure, and meeting rising water demand, while committing to emissions reductions under the Paris Agreement. These objectives compete for the same resources. The Lake Victoria region has lost 70-80% of its forest cover in the last decade, driven largely by infrastructure expansion.

Tumaini identified policy incoherence at multiple governance levels. He argued that Kenya’s National Adaptation Plan calls for substantially expanding hydropower and diversifying into geothermal and other renewable energy sources, yet this increases competition for water among energy generation, irrigation, and domestic use. Kenya’s devolved system compounds this: county authorities and national utilities frequently diverge on pricing and development priorities, and those gaps appear well before governance questions reach the regional scale. At the East African Community level, an established economic integration framework allows surplus food and energy to move across borders without lengthy institutional processes, a model that climate commitments in the region have not yet matched.

A Practical Tool for Navigating Nexus Governance

Erik Laes of VITO presented a WEF nexus governance analysis method developed within EPIC Africa, which was published in May 2026 in Environmental Science and Policy and is freely accessible until 18 June 2026. The method addresses a gap in the existing literature; most WEF nexus governance frameworks can map cross-sectoral synergies and trade-offs but do not connect those findings to governance architecture through which decisions are formally proposed, approved, and implemented. Nexus assessments also tend to carry high data and analytical demands that limit their uptake in capacity-constrained settings. The method proposed by EPIC Africa researchers works in three stages. First, one nexus challenge is selected from a matrix of WEF interactions to avoid the analytical overload of investigating every possible connection between water, energy, agriculture, and ecosystems at once. Second, national policy documents are screened for strategic coherence, with interactions coded as supportive, non-interacting, or contradictory. Third, the governance architecture is examined to locate where interventions can be embedded within existing institutional arrangements to reduce tradeoffs and create coherence

Applied to the Tana River Basin, which supplies approximately 80% of Nairobi’s water, generates over 70% of Kenya’s hydropower, and supports seven million livelihoods, the method identified 50 explicit synergies and 7 trade-offs across five national policy domains. One trade-off concerns land-use priorities: the Agricultural Policy promotes land consolidation for primary production, whereas the Land-Use Policy emphasizes areas for climate mitigation. An identified synergy concerns the development of multi-purpose dams, with both Water and Energy Policies supporting their combined use for electricity generation and irrigation. Stakeholder interviews showed, however, that hydropower considerations dominate in practice, a divergence that the document-based analysis on its own cannot capture. The method pointed to specific existing institutions where cross-sector alignment could be introduced, without proposing new coordination bodies, including the National Land-Use Policy Council, inter-ministerial review processes, and climate bodies already reporting to the UNFCCC.

Connecting the Two Approaches

Edo Abraham, who chaired the session, noted that both presentations arrived at the same place the persistent gap between nexus ambitions and governance practice stems less from insufficient policy ambition than from fragmented implementation pathways and limited intersectoral coordination. National strategies continue to prioritise sector-specific objectives, particularly in agriculture, while insufficiently accounting for cross-sectoral impacts on water, energy, and ecosystems.It was suggested that scale coherence can help make more effective investments in WEF infrastructure, including regional power pools and synergising use of transboundary water resources for energy and irrigation.

Erik acknowledged that the WEF governance method’s current scope is limited to national policy documents, which capture alignment at the level of stated policy intent rather than implementation or political practice. Extending the analysis to county-level governance in Kenya, or to EAC-wide policy instruments, would add analytical depth and is a recognized limitation in the published paper. Both research teams identified this as a direction for future work across EPIC Africa and its sister projects, including One Planet.

Watch and Join

Stay tuned for more educational webinars in the EPIC Talks series. The presentation materials are available through the EARN mailing list. To join the network and receive invitations to future sessions, visit the EPIC Africa website or connect with us on LinkedIn and watch all our videos. The articles by Léa Tatry, Erik Laes, Eunice Pereira Ramos, and Edo Abraham are freely accessible until 18 June 2026 in Environmental Science and Policy.