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Since 2014, Indonesia under Joko Widodo’s administration has been focusing on the infrastructure development. One of the priorities included here the government target for dam construction, as one of kind of water infrastructure, for 69 units until 2024. Seven dams have been planned to be built in East Nusa Tenggara Province. One of them is Lambo-Mbay Dam. It was historically planned in the early 2000s but in short-years failed, and reemerged in 2015 at Nagekeo Regency. Long process of this dam development due contestation of the dam site, Lowo Se, between government and indigenous groups. Literatures focusing on dam development mostly elaborates productivity, nature-social destructions, resistance and violence in military or non-military regime, political actors-contestation, public participation in the development, and the transformation of the local articulation into national and global articulation. Those literatures missed to see the significance of the dam site and the value of dam site related to development and dam discourse which was created the state’s persistence to build Lambo-Mbay Dam. This abstract will delve deeper to the way value and discourse is influential to dam development in Indonesia.