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The sustainable development goals (SDGs) challenge markets, regulators and practitioners to achieve multiple objectives on water, food and energy. This calls for responses that are coordinated and scaled appropriately. Learning from waterenergy-food nexus could support much-needed building of links between the separate SDGs. The concept has highlighted how risks manifest when blinkered development and management of water, food and energy reduce resource security across sectors and far-reaching scales. However, three under-studied dimensions of these risks must be better considered in order to identify leverage points for sustainable development: first, externalities and shared risks across multiple scales; second, innovative government mechanisms for shared risks; and third, negotiating the balance between silos, politics and power in addressing shared risks.

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Given the challenge of re-engineering the infrastructure of a city so that it may become a force for good in the environment, what structure of governance might promote/stifle any associated technological and technical innovations? How might the 'quality' of the sought-for governance be gauged and improved? Cultural theory is introduced to address these questions and briefly elaborated. In particular, it is shown how cultural theory can be used to refurbish Dahl's theory of pluralist democracy and provide a simple (and visual) metric of deliberative quality in governance. Matters of re-engineering the water-nutrient infrastructures of the city of Atlanta within the Chattahoochee watershed in the southeastern USA provide the primary setting for eventually applying the resulting conceptual framework. Drawing together a somewhat eclectic mix of past experience and prospective approachesranging from practical resolutions of water conflicts in Nepal, lessons learned from previous community engagement in the Atlanta-Chattahoochee system, and two stagings of the sustainability agora of the International Water Association -a cultural theory-inspired programme of work is developed to explore and assemble those elements of governance that should, in practice, enable the re-engineering needed for a city to become a force for good in its environment.