In Chapter 6, I have characterised rural development projects as part of a fluid, multisided interaction that, notwithstanding its dependence on misleading claims, its unpredictable outcomes and its contributions to victim-blaming, had its uses for both provincial officials and villagers. It helped the former stay relevant, and formed an unpredictable but appreciated part of villagers’ pursuit of livelihoods and status. This concluding chapter seeks to show these interactions at work by focusing on one site and one development NGO around 2000, and the way it was remembered a decade later. Rather than opposing experts’ claims about the benefits of participatory development to its actual political effects, it seeks to trace diverse and ambiguous outcomes by putting RIPS’s interventions in the context of local politics beyond the development arena, and of large-scale economic shifts.