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Among pastoralists, spatial mobility in ecological environments with high seasonal variations gives a relatively simple image of the types of use for water resources. Nevertheless the apparent morphological and technical simplicity of water infrastructures in pastoral environment conceals complex socio-political systems, a long-term construction of knowledge and an elaborate management of relational practices (solidarity, negotiation, conflict) within the group, with neighbouring groups, and with the State. Based on two African ethnographies (Sudan and Morocco) the article establishes a link between the socio-technical complexity of local water management and the hold that external actors (mainly the State) have over it, the latter’s discourse often having drawn attention to how nomadic pastoralists are underequipped and ecologically irrational in order to advocate a “technical” intervention linked to ideologies of struggle against tribalism and forced sedentarization.