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

This paper contributes to a long-standing debate in development practice: Under what conditions can externally established participatory groups engage in the collective management of services beyond the life 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 variation in infrastructure sustainability. It then investigates positive and negative deviance cases to answer why some communities have successfully engaged in system management despite being located in difficult conditions as per quantitative findings and vice versa.