Conflicts, cooperation and experimentation: Analysing the politics of urban water through Accra’s heterogeneous water supply infrastructure

Abstract

In this paper, we analyse the heterogeneity of water supply infrastructure in Accra, Ghana, to understand the politics of water in cities where infrastructural diversity has always been the norm. We do this by extending the use of heterogeneous infrastructure configurations as a heuristic device, shifting the focus and scale of urban political ecological analyses of infrastructural diversity from users and access to water distributions at city scale. To explain the impacts of three experiments in the distribution of water across the city, we analyse how changes in the technical and operational arrangements of Accra’s bulk water filling points reflect changes in the social relations of cooperation or conflict between the diversity of actors and infrastructure supplying water across the city. We find the uneven waterscape of the city is shaped by a plurality of actors whose practices are informed by a range of motives. These motives exceed profit-making, political legitimacy, patronage and petty corruption including also solidarity, religious beliefs and pragmatic choices. We show that distributions of water, risks and responsibilities among different actors involved in operating the water filling points are constantly contested with ambiguous and unforeseen outcomes foreclosing but also opening new possibilities for progressive experimentation. Documenting how relations between actors and technologies of water provisioning are dynamic, and open to incremental improvements towards progressive (re)distributions of water, our analysis at the city scale calls for further focus on how practices and policies of solidarity can be extended across heterogeneous provisioning systems.