Water is central to how climate change is experienced and navigated. Access to water resources is highly relational, with entangled social, political, economic, ecological and climatic domains. Pastoralist societies rely upon customary institutions and practices adapted to uncertain conditions that are fundamentally shaped by spatial and temporal variability of resources, especially water. This study explores the ways in which environmental change is being experienced in Turkana, northern Kenya, by examining the relations implicated in water access. Using a political ecology based, hydrosocial approach, we examine the intersecting concerns of (1) how water access is being shaped by new technocratic solutions for climate change adaptation, (2) how the temporal dynamics of water collection reveal competing risks, (3) how water is a driver of both mobility and immobility, and (4) how historic development interventions driven by external logics of environmental change continue to have profound impacts in the region. By drawing on empirical data collected through walking methodologies, this paper presents phenomenological accounts of the embedded impacts of co-constitutive socioecological relations, in a context characterised by rapid and diverse change. The paper concludes with a reflection on the implications of this entanglement on development approaches, in the face of increasing environmental variability and geopolitical transformations.