sometimes to construct community mosques – which are usually more in the nature of small prayer rooms. Even though these are physical entities, they symbolize different symbolic spaces – political alignments, religious differences, and even personal conflicts. Mosque prayer groups are often the site of development activity — arenas where the beneficiaries of targeted programs are decided about or where a new project that requires volunteer work is publicized. Mosques are also, often, the site of political activity, attracting charismatic speakers who attempt to mobilize their flock towards one political position or another.<sup>14</sup> In addition to such religiously driven SPGs, there are alternative sources of secular authority. These include NGO-driven credit circles, women’s groups, and governing councils associated with different development schemes that are specially designed to counter traditional government authority structures with more decentralized and accountable institutions.

Interestingly, donor agencies – particularly the World Bank – in a radical departure from practice, have structured their some of their Indonesia assistance in a manner that takes cognizance of SPGs. This was done consciously via a series of Local Level Institution studies that attempted to measure the level of “social capital” in Indonesia. In effect, these surveys (not unsurprisingly) uncovered the extent to which _svadya gotong royong_ played a role in the life of Indonesian communities. Legitimized by this, there was a conscious attempt to design projects that tried to steer community participation in a less dictatorial and more accountable direction via the multi-million dollar World Bank-assisted rural-focused Kecamatan Development Project (along with Urban Poverty Project, its urban counterpart: see Guggenheim 2005) that journalists have lauded as “stars” of the World Bank’s portfolio (Mallaby 2004). While previous projects had attempted to build on participatory institutions, they had largely placed authority in the hands of local officials and thus worked within the institutional confines of the New Order regime – with the associated negative externalities of corruption, cronyism and graft. KDP’s logic was to attempt to retain the spirit of _svadaya gotong royong_ but create new spheres of authority within SPGs that were more associated with reform: such as elected village committees and watchdogs drawn from local journalists and NGO workers<sup>15</sup> . Thus, an SPG optic was consciously employed to remake the approach of local development so that it was better aligned with the spirit of the

> 14 Note that while I am focusing on divisions within Islam, in some parts of Indonesia churches, both Catholic and Protestant, may also play a role, and in other parts Hindu temples and Buddhist viharas may provide alternative sources of authority.

> 15 A quantitative analysis of the LLI data show that a household’s participation in village government SPGs has an adverse effect on the voice and participation of neighboring households – demonstrating the “chilling” effect of SPGs that have their origins in the New Order (Alatas, Pritchett and Wetterberg  - 2002).

16