Under what conditions do governments decentralize political authority, and to what end? Scholars have framed empowering local government as a way to improve service delivery and enhance elite accountability. Yet others observe that decentralization initiatives can be engineered from within by authoritarian regimes seeking to entrench their power. In postwar Lebanon, I argue that municipal institutions were designed and employed by ethnosectarian party representatives to coopt peripheral, usually clan-based elites into national clientelist networks. This process has subsequently de-escalated demands placed on the central state. Using Arabic-language primary source documents, 130 interviews across over a dozen municipalities, and analysis of an original candidate-level local elections dataset, I show that the Lebanese civil war (1975-1990) provided the impetus for central state officials to abdicate responsibility for everyday governance to municipal authorities. Simultaneously, the ethnosectarian parties that formed during and immediately following the war leveraged the precarity of municipal institutions to co-opt elites into party networks via a variety of material incentives. Parties have subsequently achieved high rates of success in electing partisan candidates to municipal positions, particularly in electorally profitable urban areas. These findings illustrate how policy decentralization can be engineered to serve the interests of non-democratic regimes, particularly in the aftermath of civil war.