Indonesia has long been governed by pilot, launching ambitious policies in visible, limited trials before scaling nationwide. But early progress is not the same as lasting delivery.

Indonesia’s ambitious free nutritious meals program, or Makan Bergizi Gratis (MBG), was launched in January 2025 as a flagship policy of President Prabowo Subianto’s administration, fulfilling a campaign promise to address Indonesia’s chronic child malnutrition, where 21.5 percent of children under five suffer from stunting. The program has quickly moved from campaign promise to fiscal reality, with a budget allocation rising from Rp 71 trillion (approximately AUD 6.68 billion) in 2025 to Rp 335 trillion (approximately AUD 31.52 billion) in 2026, raising renewed concerns over long-term sustainability and implementation capacity. To place this into perspective, the 2026 MBG allocation alone exceeds Indonesia’s entire national health budget and represents nearly 9 percent of the country’s total projected national expenditure for that year. Yet the uncertainty surrounding MBG is not unusual. Large-scale policies in Indonesia are rarely executed in fully formed, nationwide terms. They are often introduced incrementally, through pilots and careful trials that precede full implementation. A defining feature of Indonesian governance is the use of pilot projects not as technical preparation, but as a mechanism for building legitimacy before policy is fully realized.

Major policies are introduced through limited and highly visible trials before being expanded nationwide. They serve a dual function: to contain administrative and fiscal risk while signaling progress to the public. This approach is molded by the constraints of governing a large and unevenly developed archipelagic state. Limited trials allow policymakers to navigate these disparities incrementally rather than committing to immediate system-wide execution. At the same time, political incentives favour policies that can demonstrate visible progress within short timeframes. Fiscal considerations further reinforce this pattern, as phased implementation reduces the need for large upfront commitments and allows adjustment as costs become clearer. While incremental implementation helps manage risk in the early stages, it can delay the coordination and capacity required for expansion. What emerges is a governing approach that favours early visible progress, and at times outpaces the institutional capacity required for sustained delivery.

The rollout of the Makan Bergizi Gratis (MBG) program reflects this pilot-based approach in practice. The program began as a campaign promise under Prabowo’s 2024 presidential run, originally named “Free Lunch” before being renamed and broadened in scope to include pregnant women, breastfeeding mothers, and toddlers alongside school-age children. When it launched in January 2025, the program began through limited trials in selected regions, launching across 26 provinces with around 600,000 initial beneficiaries, allowing the government to test delivery mechanisms and administrative coordination, rather than being implemented nationwide. These early phases have been accompanied by strong public visibility. Yet the transition from trial to scale introduces more complex constraints, with estimates suggesting that the program could impose a substantial and sustained fiscal burden once fully implemented, with a full scale target of 82.9 million beneficiaries by the end of 2025. While pilot areas demonstrate that distribution is possible under controlled conditions, they do not fully capture the demands of national delivery. By mid-2025 only 18.3 percent of the annual allocation had been disbursed, despite the 22.9 million beneficiaries reached. The initial rollout functions as an early validation of its feasibility, even as the requirements for long-term implementation remain uncertain.

A similar pattern of incremental implementation is reflected in the development of Nusantara Capital City (IKN). First announced by President Joko Widodo in 2019, the relocation was proposed as a solution to Jakarta’s severe overpopulation, land subsidence, and chronic congestion, while also aiming to redistribute economic development more evenly across the archipelago. The government has prioritized the construction of core administrative zones and symbolic infrastructure, rather than executing the capital relocation as a synchronized national project, deferring broader urban development to later phases. This sequencing provides an early demonstration of political commitment, particularly through highly visible milestones tied to national events. However, as with MBG, the pilot-like nature of this approach reveals underlying tensions. The initial phase showcases feasibility within a limited scope, yet the long-term viability of Nusantara depends on far more complex variables, including sustained investment flows through the creation of a functioning urban ecosystem beyond state institutions. The original funding model projected that 80 percent of IKN’s total development costs would be drawn from private and foreign investment, yet by the end of 2024, only Rp 58 trillion of a Rp 100 trillion private investment target had been realized, a shortfall that points to the distance between early construction momentum and the conditions to sustain a functioning capital city.

This approach has become a recurring feature of how Indonesia initiates policy under conditions of uncertainty. Yet this same approach carries an inherent trade-off. The strength of pilot-based governance in its ability to act quickly and demonstrate progress also shapes the limits of its long-term implementation. Part of what sustains this pattern lies in the structure of Indonesia’s political and administrative landscape. Electoral cycles create pressure for governments to show tangible results within a single term, favouring policies that are visible and fast-moving over those that are slower to build but more durable in delivery. Indonesia’s decentralization framework adds another layer of complexity. It has produced persistent gaps in implementation capacity between regions, meaning that policies designed at the national level are unevenly absorbed at the local level where delivery actually happens. Under the right conditions, pilot-projects can serve as effective tools for policy development. However, their effectiveness depends on how they are carried forward. Pilot phases are most valuable when they are treated as testing mechanisms rather than proof of success.