“Abura-politics”: The everyday politics and negotiations of households' self-supplied water infrastructure in urban Ghana

Abstract

In most Global South cities, off-grid water infrastructures such as self-supplied household dug wells and private boreholes – as alternatives or responses to limited centralised ones – have become important water sources, particularly sustaining underserved urban settlements. However, given their construction within privately held plots, reliance on these water infrastructures reveals complex politics and access arrangements. Drawing on the theoretical lens of everyday and infrastructural politics and through qualitative case studies in Ghana, this paper investigates how self-supplied water infrastructure shapes socio-material politics within households and how everyday struggles surrounding these “abura”/wells reduce or contribute to maintaining inequalities. Our analysis highlights that while self-supplied water infrastructure is critical for addressing water access gaps, it also acts as a socio-political conduit and site of socio-commodified practices that (re)produce forms of multidimensional inequalities. We demonstrate how everyday struggles around these infrastructures reveal hidden practices and socio-cultural dynamics that create distinct moral economies of resource sharing, where access is governed through cultural performances, negotiated privileges and socio-commodified exchanges rather than market mechanisms. These arrangements create complex systems of water governance that reflect broader African philosophical principles of resource distribution and social bonds, yet paradoxically (re)produce a sense of marginalisation and exploitative relations through systems of social hierarchy and negotiated access. We conclude by raising critical questions about the place-based agenda for Modular, Adaptive and Decentralised infrastructure governance, particularly self-supplied water, highlighting the need to recognise socially embedded institutions while addressing how everyday practices reproduce marginality across Global South cities.