The study which forms part of the IDS research project Going to Scale: The Potential of Community-led Total Sanitation focuses on some of the institutional issues that emerge as significant in understanding the adoption, spread and institutionalization of CLTS within public bureaucracies. Joshi uses explanations of the different trajectories of CLTS in India and Indonesia as a springboard for a discussion of some broader issues that are of relevance to the sanitation sector in the context of CLTS