This paper explores how Ethiopia’s One Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) national program seeks to reproduce hegemonic state-society relations within rural drinking water governance. Using insights from Gramscian hegemony literatures, this paper analyzes the interconnectedness of ownership, hegemony, and resistance in the WASH program in relation to wider state-society relations. The paper draws on extensive qualitative research from the Amhara region of Ethiopia and examines different service delivery modalities in rural drinking water governance. The findings suggest that end users’ resistance to the WASH program’s efforts to create ownership is not only program induced, but also an expression of wider repressive state-society relations.