This paper contributes to this line of evidence by further elucidating the conditions that are necessary for external projects to enable sustainable community management of water systems. We demonstrate that although structural determinants such as the village’s socioeconomic conditions and the water quality largely explain the likelihood of sustainability of infrastructure, it is in fact community participation that mediates the impact of structural factors. The relationship between village authorities and water user groups, in particular, the willingness of village leaders to cooperate with project personnel and community members, conditions the quality of participation that projects can forge. The incentives of both the village authority (typically the village head) as well as the water user group leader (as a representative of the community) matter a great deal in the demand for the project, the space provided for community mobilization, the effectiveness of trainings and capacity building by facilitators, and the day-to-day operations and management of the water systems.

We argue that the incentives to cooperate in turn emanate from both a desire for personal growth and for moral standing and that the two are difficult to separate. Borrowing from Tsai’s (2007, 356) conceptualization of ‘a moral standing’, we find that local leaders are motivated by “a sort of esteem, respect, or approval that is granted by an individual or a collectivity for performances or qualities they consider above the average” (Tsai 2007). However, unlike Tsai, we did not find “a shared solidary group or shared moral obligation” to be a necessary condition for public officials to be incentivized to cooperate. Rather, the desire to cooperate was equally instrumental, that is, due to village authorities or local leaders promoting their own personal and career growth. Thus, our findings also mirror Ang’s (2016) conclusion<sup>7</sup> that a more “transactional” type of exchange, whereby local ties are mobilized in project implementation, can produce sustainable service delivery in the longer term. In comparison, in our negative deviance cases, local leaders were found to be driven by a more zero sum understanding of self-interest, which Ang (2016) labels “extortionist”, and which leads to unsustainable service delivery. Our findings suggest, therefore, that in contexts where local government and community ties are more synergistic and, though maybe driven by self-interest, are precisely not at the expense of communities, they play an important role in generating sustainable collective infrastructure management. Project managers should therefore pay more attention to local socio-political ties during project preparation and ensure that projects are implemented in a way that will generate reduced transaction costs and an innovative space for water user group leaders. In this manner, projects can attempt to induce a positive pathway of community management at best or avoid a negative pathway at worst. The lessons from the paper can be used for context-specific practical strategies outside the Indonesian context as well (Brixi, Lust, and Woolcock 2005).

# Data and Methodology

We measure _sustainability_ through the lens of _water point functionality over time_ . This definition is consistent with both policy and academic measures with an agreed-upon view that community water supplies are considered sustainable if they continue to work and be used _over time_ (Carter and Ross 2016).

We use panel data on water system functionality from the project’s monitoring database that contains information at the village level on every single water point constructed since the program’s inception—currently amounting to water systems in 16,000 villages. The status of these water systems is assessed by facilitators every three months through in-person field visits. Based on this

> 7 Ang (2016) argues that local officials in China were able to carry out innovative solutions and had decision space to use resources though under the general guidance of central agencies, a process she calls “directed improvisation”.

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