<![CDATA[This study examines how collaborative governance is practiced in the management of Village Funds (Dana Desa) in marginal villages of Bengkulu Province, Indonesia, through the analytical lens of institutional bricolage. While national policy on Village Fund allocation assumes a uniform, rule-based model of village governance, marginal villages characterized by geographic isolation, limited administrative capacity, and thin economic bases frequently experience a mismatch between formal regulatory design and local realities. Employing a multi-site qualitative case study across three purposively selected marginal villages, this research explores the mechanisms through which local actors village officials, customary leaders, community facilitators, and citizens reassemble, borrow, and improvise informal collaboration norms when formal rules prove inadequate or unresponsive to local conditions. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews, direct field observation, and document review, and were analyzed using an institutional bricolage framework encompassing borrowing, aggregation, alteration, and legitimation processes. The findings reveal that village fund governance in marginal contexts is not merely an implementation of central policy but an ongoing, socially embedded process of institutional reconstruction that blends bureaucratic procedure with customary practice, kinship-based reciprocity, and religious norms. This bricolage produces hybrid collaborative arrangements that both extend and constrain community empowerment outcomes. The study contributes a novel theoretical application of institutional bricolage to village fund collaborative governance a sub-field dominated by program-effectiveness evaluation and offers policy recommendations for accommodating institutional pluralism in marginal village development.]]>
