The goal of the study is to strengthen the analytical purchase of the term water governance and improve the utility of the concept for describing and analyzing actual water distribution processes. We argue this is necessary as most writing on water governance is more concerned with promoting particular politically inspired agendas of what water governance should be than with understanding what it actually is. We believe that water governance at heart is about political choices as to where water should flow; about the norms, rules and laws on which such choices should be based; about who is best able or qualified to decide about this; and about the kind of societal future such choices support. We identify distributions-of water, voice and authority, and expertise-as the empirical anchor and entry-point of our conceptualization of water governance. This usefully allows foregrounding questions of equity in water governance discussions and provides the empirical foundation for a meaningful engagement with the politics of water governance.

Small towns lag behind cities in drinking water and sanitation access globally. Closing this gap requires developing service models for areas with both urban and rural characteristics. This study assessed Bushenyi-Ishaka, a municipality in Uganda situated at the rural–urban transition, with a focus on service ladder indictors. Data sources included household interviews (n = 500) and water quality samples from sources and storage containers. Households in more urban (as compared to rural) cells were more likely to use improved water sources (including piped water on-premises), make regular payments for water, rely on shared sanitation facilities, and make use of manual sludge emptying services. Most households (72%) used an unlined pit latrine not intended for emptying and reuse. These findings suggest that small town servicing models should prioritize non-sewered sanitation management, including incentives for safe excreta containment and disposal opportunities. This study also highlights a need for integrated services models to expand rural–urban water and sanitation coverage.

No abstract

Inspired by the proposal of political scientists and anthropologists to focus on “practice” as the smallest unit of analysis for understanding politics, as well as the renewed scholarly attention to materiality, this paper sets out to show that detailed ethnographic attention to processes and acts of sociotechnical tinkering provides a useful entry-point for understanding water governance. This is so methodologically, because infrastructural forms of tinkering are very visible, and therefore researchable, manifestations of agency and change in water governance. Attention to sociotechnical tinkering helps shift the basis for understanding water realities from official norms, designs and laws to everyday practices. This in turn allows questioning, rather than assuming, how expertise and agency are exercised and distributed in water governance, thereby also providing useful information for re-thinking water politics. In addition, by explicitly engaging with the contingency and capriciousness of actual water flows, a sociotechnical tinkering approach entails a much-needed re-appreciation of the materiality of water, infrastructure and other matter, a re-appreciation that extends to those who design, construct, operate and use water infrastructure.