Negotiating power, managing nutrition: contestation of local governance Indonesia’s free nutritious meal program
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.47540/ijqr.v6i1.2799Keywords:
Hybrid Governance, Negotiated Legitimacy, Symbolic StatecraftAbstract
Public nutrition policy in the Global South increasingly operates beyond the boundaries of technocratic welfare administration. This article investigates how Indonesia’s Free Nutritious Meal Programme (MBG) evolves into a contested arena of negotiated legitimacy, symbolic statecraft, and relational governance. Using an interpretive-constructivist approach, the study examines MBG implementation in Bungo Regency through in-depth interviews, field observations, and document analysis. The findings reveal that welfare distribution does not function through coherent bureaucratic coordination alone, but through fragmented negotiations among local governments, schools, informal actors, and community networks. MBG operates not merely as a nutritional intervention, but as a political technology through which the state reproduces visibility, moral authority, and public legitimacy in everyday social life. The study further demonstrates that governance in the Global South is sustained less by procedural certainty than by relational bargaining, bureaucratic improvisation, and symbolic performances of welfare. The article contributes to interpretive governance scholarship by reconceptualizing nutrition policy as a relational mechanism for the production of state authority under conditions of hybrid and contested governance.
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