Why do people continue to participate in development projects in spite of the vast literature cataloguing development's flaws? At Pahari Sansthan, the NGO in Uttarakhand, India where I conducted eighteen months of ethnographic research between 2012 and 2015, local people participated in projects because they fit them into strategies for living worthwhile lives. Extant understandings of happiness and wellbeing cannot explain the connections people in Uttarakhand made between immediate desires and long-term aspirations. People from Uttarakhand wanted to live lives that met short-term needs while they worked towards larger goals. However, Pahari Sansthan's donors and senior management thought that their beneficiaries wanted to maximize financially useful benefits for themselves above all else and designed projects accordingly.

This disconnect between what beneficiaries wanted and what NGO leaders thought they wanted was negotiated in project implementation. Fieldworkers, who were from the same villages as beneficiaries, maintained relationships with them that allowed everyone to access the resources needed to meet their immediate and distant needs. Because people did not want to violate the moral rules that governed these connections, fieldworkers and beneficiaries altered Pahari Sansthan's projects so that they fit with strategies to lead 'good enough' lives. Fieldworkers hid many of these changes from scrutiny by strategically using reporting procedures. Contrary to existing literature on standardization, data collectors were not necessarily restricted by auditing practices. Fieldworkers also obscured alterations to projects by deliberately deploying the silent deference expected by NGO managers---who were higher status in terms of wealth, education, and urban experience (an increasingly prominent status marker in India) than fieldworkers. Although fieldworkers' actions allowed projects to continue, they also left changes made vulnerable to misinterpretation by superiors whose views of development and human motivation remained unchallenged.

This research makes important contributions to scholarship on status in India, moral economies and wellbeing, social networks, quantification, and NGO-led development. If development workers truly want projects to fit local contexts, they should allow field-level workers more familiar with those contexts to adjust projects in practice and thus avoid the need for obfuscation.