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.

Hydrosocial territories scholarship has contributed to advancing relational, power‐sensitive, multiscalar understandings of water and its governance. Grounded in critical water studies, political ecology, and political geography, this scholarship draws attention to how water distributions are contested between different interest groups and their respective notions of how water is and should be governed at multiple interrelated spatial and temporal scales. We provide an overview of the literature on hydrosocial territories with the objective of tracing the development and application of this framework since its introduction in the mid‐2010s. The article summarizes how hydrosocial territories research has developed conceptually, methodologically, and thematically. We find that hydrosocial territories research employs largely qualitative methodologies to study water‐related disputes surrounding a diversity of themes including hydraulic infrastructures, agricultural production and export, urbanization, river basin management, extractive industries, and conservation. We conclude with a reflection on potential ways forward for hydrosocial territories scholarship.

Accra, the capital city of Ghana, is characterized by limited networked supply, heterogeneous water providers, and various forms of provision. In this paper, we explore how the people delivering water through water tankers shape the distribution of water across the city. Drawing on empirical descriptions of water sourcing and distribution by truck drivers, we show that who gets what water at what price is shaped by the ability of tanker drivers to act as brokers, piecing together various social and material arrangements and resorting to different rationalities and expertise. We analyze how state actors deal with tanker supply seeking to reconcile their mandates with the realities of water supply. Analyzing urban water supply through the practices of water distribution, we show the messy and open-ended character of water governance processes. A practice-based approach makes the complex interrelations between different water providers across the city visible, and underscores the role of individual and collective identities, emotions, moral norms, and unequal interdependencies between actors in shaping urban water distributions.