"Moving Towards Adaptive Governance in Complexity: Informing Nexus Security" (MAGIC) was a four-year project funded under the EU Horizon 2020 programme that ended in 2020. The goal of MAGIC has been to transform the Water-Energy-Food nexus from a shorthand to signify the complexity of the relationship between water, soils energy and climate into a set of relationships over identified factors which can be systematically used to explore this complexity. This implies integrating social challenges and stakeholders views related to the water-energy-food- nexus into the analysis. Dialogue spaces were opened, dissemination strategies enacted and mixed qualitative-quantitative tools developed in the context of a community building exercise transcending mechanistic scientist-policy maker separation but taking full advantage of the rich spectrum of actors and institutions active in the nexus.