Written during the Lebanese Civil War, the Municipal Act of 1977 set the goal of dispersing governmental power from the central government to local municipalities and their officials, with the intention of spreading power amongst Lebanon’s eighteen sectarian groups. The Act has been a failure however, and rather than ‘end’ sectarian division, seems to have only perpetuated it: from the Act’s implementation about a decade after the war’s end to its inability to provide economic, bureaucratic, or political means necessary for sustainable decentralization. Indeed, the perpetual economic crises plaguing Lebanon—electricity cuts, water shortages, and garbage emergencies lasting months on end—are direct results and can be understood as inevitable outcomes of the failure of the decentralization planned in the 1977 Act. As importantly, these crises have only perpetuated the very divisions imbalances that the Act sought to alleviate. This paper contends with two main matters: first, the Act itself—its implementation, and the implications of unsubstantiated decentralization on Municipalities. In tracing and providing a historiography of the Act, my second objective is to analyze its material effects on local governance, infrastructure, and resources. Based on ethnographic research conducted in the village of Aitat in the Mount Lebanon Governorate, I historicize and assesses new waste-management site constructed in Aitat through the Municipal Act. I argue that the Act reproduced a spatialized sectarianism that intrinsically creates a reliance on sect-based politics for subsistence, and use the waste-management site in Aitat to display these manifestations. Ultimately, this paper contends with how municipalities attempt to enact the Act’s failed decentralization, and how the Act has paved a road towards what I term sectarianism as a mode of governance.