This paper rereads debates over water security and insecurity through the tools of critical geographical scholarship. It seeks to demonstrate the value of such a critical perspective in achieving access to water for all. While rejecting a simplistic dismissal of mainstream discourses on water security, the paper notes the failure to adequately politicise the processes and relationships that reproduce water inequalities. Finding lessons in recent writings on political ecology, the hydro‐social cycle and on the right to water, the paper concludes with a Gramscian claim to build from the fragmented but situated knowledges implicit in struggles to achieve democratic access to water.