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.

Since the UN Water Conference in 1977, international debates have centered on global water scarcity and achieving sustainable development. In 1995, Morocco introduced a water policy to strengthen the country’s socio-economic development through irrigated agriculture, while ensuring the long-term sustainability of water resources through integrated water resource management (IWRM). Empirical research, however, reveals decreasing groundwater levels and increasing inequalities around water access. The purpose of this article is to shed light on the challenges this policy provokes for achieving sustainable development, the limitations it faces to implement IWRM, and provide insights on how the policy is linked to the increased pressure on water resources as reported in the literature. We conducted a content analysis of ten key water policy documents and thirty-seven in-depth semi-structured interviews undertaken between 2020 and 2021 with governmental actors and inhabitants of the Middle Draa Valley (south Morocco). We found that sustainability and social-inequality problems unintendedly triggered by the policy were linked to three factors: the use of a disciplinary approach for policy formulation and its limitations to encompass the complexity of the water-related problems, the compartmentalization of government sectors hindering the development of sound solutions to water-related problems, and the neglect of social, economic, and political factors affecting actual access to water.

Using the concept of sociotechnical tinkering, this paper provides detailed empirical observations about the everyday practices of design, construction, operation, maintenance and use of a piped water supply network in a small town in Mozambique. We use these to show that the form, materiality, and functioning of this water infrastructure are constantly changing as result of interactions with its physical environment as well as in response to experimentation and improvisation by engineers, construction workers, operators and water users. Sociotechnical tinkering not just (re)distributes water, but also provides an avenue through which powers to control water flows can be wielded and exercised. In this sense, empirical attention to sociotechnical tinkering provides a useful entry-point for rethinking the distribution of control, authority and responsibility in water governance, or more broadly the relations between power and infrastructure. This, in turn, may yield new inspirations for identifying pragmatic possibilities for progressive water politics.

Groundwater resources in arid regions are under increasing strain, making effective governance critical for mitigating resource degradation. Recognising the context-specific nature of water governance, and challenging the prescription of universal solutions, this study examines groundwater governance challenges and opportunities in Morocco's Middle Drâa Valley through three case studies: Faija, Fezouata, and M’hamid. Guided by governance modes, the social-ecological system framework, and incentive structure analysis, we analysed 76 semi-structured interviews, 30 structured interviews, and 2 focus group discussions. Our findings highlight diverse governance challenges shaped by each area's unique social-ecological characteristics and emerging hierarchical, self-governance, and hybrid models. Our results also indicated that institutional misalignment between self-governance institutions and governmental bodies remains a key challenge. While government-proposed aquifer contracts may provide a framework to address this issue by promoting a unified governance system, adjustments are needed to enhance resource user involvement in decision-making and ensure water users adhere to the rules. Graphical abstract

The authors wish to make the following correction to this paper