<![CDATA[Law No. 6 of 2014 on Villages introduces a new development paradigm that positions villages as autonomous actors in empowerment-based governance. This study examines the performance of village facilitators in operationalizing community empowerment within the implementation of the Village Law in Lebak Regency. Employing a qualitative-descriptive design based on secondary data, including the Village Development Index (IDM), policy documents, and program evaluations, the findings reveal a structural gap between the normative empowerment mandate and its institutional enactment. In practice, facilitators largely operate within administrative and procedural domains rather than as transformative agents of social change, reflected in the absence of independent villages during 2021–2024. The findings suggest that empowerment-oriented decentralization reforms are highly contingent upon institutional capacity, role clarity, and local power configurations. When these elements are misaligned, empowerment risks being reconstituted into bureaucratic formalism, where compliance supersedes transformation. This dynamic illustrates the tension between normative policy design and institutional rationalities at the local level, highlighting how governance reforms may reproduce hierarchical control mechanisms even within participatory frameworks. Reorienting facilitation practices toward context-sensitive, socially embedded approaches is therefore essential to preserve the transformative intent of village governance reform.]]>
