This pattern appears wherever water management infrastructure is built and handed over without the social institutions needed to sustain it. It connects upward to The Exported Social Contract and sideways to The Predicted Conflict.

Water management infrastructure requires continuous collective maintenance to function. When the social institutions, incentives, and financing needed to maintain it are not built alongside it, the physical system gradually degrades while the natural systems it replaced are already gone.

A sluice gate is built. A canal is dug. An embankment is raised. The construction is completed on time and within budget. The project is declared a success. The team moves on.

Five years later, the sluice gate is operated by whoever has the power to operate it. The canal has silted up. The embankment has not been repaired after the last flood season. The Water Management Committee, established with great care during the project, has not met since the project budget ran out. Its members were never re-elected. There was no mechanism for re-election. There was no budget for meetings.

The infrastructure is still there, visibly. But the system it was meant to create is gone.

This failure is not accidental. It is structural. Project logic is oriented toward construction. Budgets are allocated for building, not for the decades of collective management that follow. Evaluation happens at completion, when the infrastructure is new and the institutions are still formally in place. The slow deterioration that follows — of canals, of committees, of collective habits — happens after the project has closed and the evaluators have left.

There is a deeper problem still. The infrastructure, while it was functioning, replaced something. Natural drainage patterns were altered. Communities reorganized their practices around the new system. The traditional knowledge of living with the water as it was — which flood to plant before, which channel to use in the dry season — quietly disappeared, carried away with the generation that no longer needed it. When the infrastructure fails, there is nothing to fall back on. The community is stranded between a broken modern system and a traditional system that no longer exists.

Design the governance and maintenance culture before designing the infrastructure. Budget for decades of collective management, not just for construction. Evaluate interventions not at completion but years later, when the institutions have been tested by real conditions without project support. And never replace a natural system faster than the community can build the collective capacity to manage what replaces it.

This pattern is supported by:

— The Exported Social Contract — The Predicted Conflict — The Boundary Creates the Outside