Abstract
South Africa's constitutional commitment to ensuring access to sufficient water coexists with persistent infrastructure and service failures that shape everyday life in many municipalities. While existing scholarship has documented the institutional and technical drivers of water service deterioration, less attention has been paid to how residents themselves interpret and evaluate these failures. This paper addresses this gap through an interpretive qualitative study of the lived experience of water service failure in the Madibeng Local Municipality. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 27 residents across three communities with differing infrastructural conditions, the study examines how people experience unreliable water supply, perceived poor water quality, and inconsistent emergency provision. The findings show that water service failure is experienced not only as a technical disruption but as a recurring condition that structures everyday life and requires ongoing adaptation. Residents' explanations are articulated through narratives of corruption, mismanagement, and neglect, which function as interpretive frameworks for assigning responsibility and making sense of uncertainty, while also incorporating multi-causal accounts of infrastructure decay, technical limitations, and electricity disruptions. By situating these narratives within broader patterns of infrastructural decline and municipal strain, the paper shows how