Peer Appropriation in Indonesia's Free Nutritious Meal Program: Moral Development and Environmental Design Solutions.

Indonesia's Free Nutritious Meal (Makan Bergizi Gratis, MBG) program serves 55 million students nationwide. Policy design ensures equitable allocation, yet classroom-level implementation reveals a persistent problem: students take fellow classmates' meal portions despite having already received their own. Through observational research in a vocational high school in East Java, this study documents systematic peer appropriation patterns across multiple classes. The analysis identifies two interacting failure modes: insufficient moral reasoning and environmental design that provides high opportunity with low perceived detection risk. This paper proposes an integrated approach combining consequentialist moral reasoning curriculum and low-cost environmental redesign of meal distribution.