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Global megatrends, such as the impacts of climate change and global population growth,require an integrated and comprehensive management of natural resources that accountsfor the various interrelations that exist between them. The food-energy-water nexusfocuses on these interrelations. The main contribution of this thesis, firstly, is tooperationalize the nexus concept for political analyses in order to adequately analyze policyintegration between agricultural, water and energy policy. Secondly, the new developedanalytical framework is applied to the case study of Germany.The Institutional Analysis and Development Framework serves as the basic methodologicalframework. It focuses on central institutions, involved actors as well as further determiningfactors. The basic framework is extended in two ways. Firstly, a value dimension is added,which allows to identify underlying values and associated value conflicts in the respectivepolicy fields. Secondly, the value-based framework is extended by the concept ofEnvironmental Policy Integration. This allows for the development of two novel analyticalframeworks that capture the different levels of vertical and horizontal policy integrationrelated to the food-energy-water nexus.In the second part of the thesis, the newly developed methodological framework is appliedto the case study of Germany. The analysis identifies seven different key challenges relatedto nexus governance, each affecting different linkages between policy fields. Overarchingchallenges that include all policy fields simultaneously are establishing sustainabledevelopment as a guiding policy principle, climate protection and biodiversity conservation.Challenges that affect linkages between selected policy fields are: water pollution fromagriculture, sustainable production of bioenergy, energy consumption in agriculture, andenergy consumption from wastewater treatment plants. The analysis also shows that thechallenges are strongly interrelated and that they need to be addressed at different policylevels. Eventually, eight key policy recommendations are derived from these findings.

Avoiding dangerous climate change necessitates the decarbonization of electricity systems within the next few decades. In Germany, this decarbonization is based on an increased exploitation of variable renewable electricity sources such as wind and solar power. While system security has remained constantly high, the integration of renewables causes additional costs. In 2015, the costs of grid management saw an all time high of about € 1 billion. Despite the addition of renewable capacity, these costs dropped substantially in 2016. We thus investigate the effect of natural climate variability on grid management costs in this study. We show that the decline is triggered by natural wind variability focusing on redispatch as a main cost driver. In particular, we find that 2016 was a weak year in terms of wind generation averages and the occurrence of westerly circulation weather types. Moreover, we show that a simple model based on the wind generation time series is skillful in detecting redispatch events on timescales of weeks and beyond. As a consequence, alterations in annual redispatch costs in the order of hundreds of millions of euros need to be understood and communicated as a normal feature of the current system due to natural wind variability.