Governance Drivers of Rural Water Sustainability : Collaboration in Frontline Service Delivery

This paper contributes to a long-standing debate in development practice: Under whatconditions can externally established participatory groups engage in the collective management of services beyond thelife of a project Using 10 years of panel data on water point functionality from Indonesia’s rural water program,the Program for Community-Based Water Supply and Sanitation, the paper explores the determinants of subnational variationin infrastructure sustainability. It then investigates positive and negative deviance cases to answer why somecommunities have successfully engaged in system management despite being located in difficult conditions as perquantitative findings and vice versa. The findings show that differences in the implementation of communityparticipation, driven by local social relations between frontline service providers, that is, village authoritiesand water user groups, explain sustainable management. This initial condition of state-society relations influences howthe project is initiated, kicking off negative or positive reinforcing pathways, leading to community collective actionor exit. The paper concludes that the relationships between frontline government representatives and community actorsare an important and underexamined aspect of the ability of external projects to generate successful community-ledmanagement of public goods.