When ‘getting by’ masquerades as entrepreneurship: survival, improvisation and compensatory governance in rural Indonesia

Indonesia’s decentralized governance system is a site where frontline workers bridge gaps between policy mandates and available institutional capacity through compensatory practices that combine formal procedures with informal adaptations. This paper examines how frontline actors in rural East Java engage in compensatory governance in childhood nutrition policy implementation – practices that draw on personal resources, social networks and traditional cooperation mechanisms to achieve policy outcomes that formal systems cannot adequately support. Drawing on qualitative fieldwork across three villages, we document how these practices make policy effectiveness possible but bring up hard questions about sustainability and equity, as workers bear significant personal costs – financial, temporal and relational – that receive limited institutional recognition or support. The findings challenge how frontline innovation is understood in public administration scholarship, suggesting that what appears as entrepreneurial adaptation may also constitute reliance on uncompensated labour from implementers who face pressure to subsidize state functions through their own capacity. We argue that governance effectiveness in resource-constrained contexts depends significantly on contributions from frontline workers that scholarly frameworks often celebrate as local innovation without fully examining their costs or implications for worker well-being.