In this empirically-driven, practice oriented research, the rural water sector in sub-Saharan Africa is examined from a systems perspective. In the face of rapidly changing and uncertain futures, the need for policy makers and practitioners to identify and respond to the multiple, seemingly intractable problems that give rise to stagnating water services levels despite decades of national and international efforts to achieve universal water service coverage, has never been more pressing. The aim of the research is to establish a way to consistently conceptualise the dynamics among actors in multi-level, multi-actor socio-technical systems, involved in the implementation of national policies and strategies to deliver nationally determined water service levels. The domain of inquiry is rural water services in the Republic of Uganda. It was conducted under the auspices of the Triple-S action research programme in which the researcher took part as a team member in the period 2008-2014. This study seeks practical, actionable insights into the extent to which the complexity sciences, and in specific agent-based modelling, can provide a useful policy analysis and planning approach for examining promising policy, technological and learning mechanisms for achieving universal water services in a given context.