The Indonesian state historically established patrimonial ties with relatively homogenous local elites, using them to make rural life accessible and identifiable for the center. As rural life has been reorganized in functional and territorial terms, patrimonial ties have been preserved as the primary means of extracting communal resources for state formation. The political structure was characterized by a dualism that perpetuated ambiguous boundaries between state actors and social forces at the expense of the population. The same logic of state formation can be observed in the current neoliberal efforts at democratic decentralization in developing countries. For the sake of bureaucratic efficiency and political stability, donors, international aid agencies, and local governments transfer power and resources to local institutions—private bodies, customary authorities, and civil-society organizations. In so doing they reinforce the self-perpetuating structure of dualism put in place in during intensified state formation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Drawing on history and ethnography in the Priangan highland of West Java, Indonesia, this article shows how the implementation of democratic decentralization articulates with the preexisting structure of institutions and ideas, undermining rather than promoting government accountability and popular participation.