This article looks into community governance of rural drinking water systems in Araucania, southern Chile. Through various social research techniques, including semi-structured interviews, participant observation, and social network analysis, we obtained results that point to social capital and the patrimonialisation of the resource as the main mechanisms generating community cooperation that facilitates the subsistence of the system. In a context of high privatization, the study identifies the alienation of water rights and some group characteristics, such as the lack of socio-technical skills, as the main factors that hinder the survival of the system.