The 'resource nexus' has emerged over the past decade as an important new paradigm of environmental governance, which emphasises the interconnections, tensions and synergies between sectors that have traditionally been managed separately. Nexus thinking presents itself as a radically new approach to integrated governance in response to interconnected socio-environmental challenges and constraints. This paper provides a critical review of nexus thinking. The nexus paradigm, we contend, is part of a broader trend towards integrated environmental governance where previously externalised 'bad' nature is increasingly internalised by capital. In general, the nexus discourse has become techno-managerial in style, linear in its analysis and reductionist in its recommendations. Focussing particularly on urban water and energy infrastructure as important political sites in the (re)configuration of resource connectivities, we advance two principal arguments. Firstly, that the current nexus thinking inadequately conceptualises the scalar politics of interconnections between resource sectors. Secondly, we challenge the currently pervasive focus on technological and institutional 'solutions', efficiency-oriented ecological modernist vision and the presentation of 'integration' as a panacea for unsustainable resource practices.

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China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is heralded as the largest investment in infrastructure in history and is expected to re‐shape the geographies of urbanisation in the coming decades. In this paper we review the burgeoning, yet still embryonic literature on the BRI. Our aim is to move beyond currently dominant framings of the BRI as a geopolitical or economic strategy that tend to overlook the complex embeddedness of infrastructure. Drawing on theories of planetary urbanisation, we argue that the BRI constitutes a form of urbanisation that is bound up with the socio‐spatial and ecological restructuring of global capitalism. We illustrate this by mapping and analysing energy projects under the BRI. Overall, we outline a research agenda on the BRI that calls for (1) a more nuanced analysis of its spatial and scalar politics; (2) approaching the BRI as a distinctly urban question; and (3) a disruption of the dominant China‐centric discussions through critical in‐depth case‐study analysis.

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