Paper short abstract:

This paper will discuss the way key actors (multiscalar government, facilitators, & village elite) shape the outcome of the direct-fund channeling to village level into building under-utilised toilets in Papua Province, Indonesia.

Paper long abstract:

A Community Driven Development Program (CDD), aiming to facilitate community planning and decision-making process leading to block grants to fund villager's self-prioritized infrastructure, has emerged as a new paradigm for building village infrastructure in the aid development community. The Government of Indonesia has allocated US$ 400 Million since 2007-2012 for a program covering around 79,000 villages. Despite the 'reform' promise in this remote and lack of infrastructure region in Indonesia, surprisingly in Papua Province, of 3,234 villages in Papua Province, Indonesia, who have been given this direct-fund grants, almost 70 per cent villages had used the grant to build a toilet, and only around 20% is effectively used. This PhD research contributes to discussion on a much-neglected aspect of CDD studies: the process that leads to the failure of this program to building underutilised infrastructures. In this research, I employ an actor-oriented approach with an emphasis to understand actors' practices combined with actors' interface analysis by Norman Long. I focus on the case of CDD in Papua Province, Indonesia, to unfold the practices and power dynamics of diverse actors, ranging from villagers, facilitators, officials (at the central and provincial level) and aid agency. In this paper, I will discuss the production of the 'toilets' to demonstrate how toilets is a convenient type of infrastructure that fits central government's control over budget absorption and to mitigate the Papua Nationalists, as well as villager's idea on modernisation.