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.

Water governance in two urban African contexts: agency and action through participatory video

“…Access to potable water remains one of the key sustainability challenges in Ghana's urban and periurban settlements. While the country as a whole met the Millennium Development Goal of reducing by half the proportion of its citizens without access to potable water and sanitation services (Harris, 2021b), there remain ongoing disparities in access (Alba et al, 2020). Despite an increase of water access in urban areas, many households remain unconnected to potable water from the national mains, which has created distinct hierarchies of consumers (Oteng-Ababio et al, 2017).…”

First-Class but not for Long: Heterogeneous Infrastructure and Water Bricolage in Accra’s Kiosk Compounds

“…Following insights from water governance literature, we also pay attention to the role of other urban actors/bricoleurs to interrogate how through their practices they (might) limit or enhance the opportunities of kiosk inhabitants to access water. Specifically, following insights from existing research on Accra's waterscape, we pay attention to traditional authorities (Frick-Trzebitzky et al, 2017), water vendors (Alba et al, 2020), and plot-owners (Dapaah & Harris, 2017) as they shape urban water access. Moreover, while the coexistence of different water supplies and access configurations has been analyzed in lower income informal settlements and peripheral areas where networked infrastructure is rather limited or absent, we extend the analysis to a first-class residential neighborhood served by networked supply.…”

“…4 The closest place where they can get water is the neighbor living just opposite, but several neighbors in the vicinity sell water, three only in the street where the piped water runs. The GWCL has authorized private residents to resell pipe-born water by the bucket provided that they register as commercial customers, water bills are paid for, and illegal connections are not established (Alba et al, 2020)-although it was unclear if Augustina's neighbor was authorized by the GWCL. At the neighbor's "there is always water," we were told; he is connected to the network, and if the water is not running, he buys water from a tanker.…”

“…It remains unclear why Astar was not allowed to resell water to tanker trucks as the water company authorizes private households to resale water to tanker trucks provided that they register as commercial customers and that they regularly pay monthly bills(Alba et al, 2020).7 We could not confirm this with kiosk inhabitants buying water from Astar and/or with the GWCL.…”

Telecoupled Groundwaters: New Ways to Investigate Increasingly De-Localized Resources

“…This circulation is strongly influenced by power relations and political interests on where water ought to flow to or not, and it has been described as the hydrosocial cycle [14]. Infrastructure plays a key role in the reconfigurations of groundwater in the hydrosocial cycle, mainly in distributing (de-localizing) water mined at point sources in the form of pumps, pipes, and trucks and also in accessing and storing (de-temporalizing) water through reservoirs and tanks [27]. Policy and trade shape land and water use.…”