Water is a scarce resource in many semi-arid cities in the developing world, but remains ignored within the domain and processes of urban planning. This paper compares urban planning in Botswana with aspects of planning theory and public policy theory to assess the disjunction between urban and water planning. It shows that conventional urban planning processes neglect water resource planning because it is an unconventional land-use planning issue. Water planning is a concern that warrants a central role in urban planning in order to reconfigure the water management paradigm and shift the emphasis away from water supply augmentation, which dominated the twentieth century.