resulted in technical and financial problems. Today, the community has reverted to using river water for bathing and washing and private tanker water for drinking. Residents complained that at times, the river water is brackish, sour, and sticky when bathing due to palm oil waste. Gastroenteritis broke out in 2016 and caused fatalities.

The presence of various forms of governance failure—capture, competition, or apathy by the village authorities—meant that project facilitators were operating in an environment where the coordination complexities of carrying out community socialization as well as the legitimacy of the project was compromised. Lack of proper socialization meant that though the community was interested in receiving the water service, they were not ready with a mind-set to contribute funds or pay for house connections, did not know who would carry out the operations and management, and saw the service as someone else’s responsibility. In some villages, elite capture simply resulted in communities opting out of the system altogether, resorting to private individual solutions for water. What allowed village leaders the space for apathy is their source of authority, which as the statements above revealed, emanated not from local community support but from external sources.

# Conclusion

This paper sought to understand the conditions under which projects can create sustainable community management of water services. Through analysis of project- and village-level data, we found that community participation is indeed associated with sustainable villages where infrastructure has been managed by communities for 6 to 10 years without rehabilitation support. We also found that socioeconomic conditions and water conditions of the village have a strong impact on community management. We then sought to answer why we still see pockets of success and failure as a way of understanding exactly what mechanisms participation works through, that is, why we still see sustainable community management in places characterized by difficult water and socioeconomic conditions and unsustainable management in structurally more enabling conditions.

We found that collaboration between frontline providers—village authorities and water user groups—is an important influence on the nature of participatory implementation. The degree and nature of community involvement could kick off a cycle of positive and self-reinforcing service delivery: aligned incentives between frontline actors lead to collaborative partnerships which lead to a better quality of socialization, enable community groups to buy into the water systems, be willing to pay for house connections, and be willing to finance system repairs through their tariff contributions. Collaboration manifests as local village leaders providing village facilities, funds, personnel, facilitation, and other forms of support by mobilizing the village apparatus. Collaboration also comes in the form of an interested village head enabling water user group leadership and innovations in problem solving. This in turn produces water services that are regular and of good quality, and the positive experience drives communities to continue ‘opting into’ the water services as opposed to ‘exiting’ to use Hirschman’s terms.<sup>23</sup> In contrast to conventional understandings of water demand leading to sustainability, we learned that sustained community management and

> 23 Albert Hirschman’s influential book (1970) describes how members of an organization or a community can, when they perceive a decrease in quality of goods or service provided, have two options: they can exit (withdraw from the relationship) or they can voice (attempt to repair or improve the relationship through communication of the grievance). For example, the citizens of a country may respond to increasing political repression in two ways: emigrate or protest. Similarly, employees can choose to quit their unpleasant job or express their concerns in an effort to improve the situation. Disgruntled customers can choose to shop elsewhere or they ask for the manager.

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