Who Governs the Ungovernable? Policy Orphans and Public Service Innovation in the Voids of Indonesia’s Migration Governance

What happens when the very populations whose sacrifice drives policy success are erased from the governance systems that profit from them? We theorize “policy orphan status” as a condition where populations are (a) essential to a celebrated policy outcome, (b) structurally excluded from related governance frameworks, and (c) locked into invisibility by the logic that produces that success. Unlike underserved groups, policy orphans do not fall through cracks in existing institutions—they exist outside the architecture of governance altogether. Through qualitative comparative fieldwork across three East Javanese districts, drawing on 12 in-depth interviews and three focus group discussions with 45 participants, we examine how street-level bureaucrats invent governance from nothing when Indonesia’s labor migration system creates millions of children no framework can see. We find officials building institutions without blueprints, extending theory beyond street-level bureaucracy and policy entrepreneurship into institutional genesis within cross-jurisdictional, post-territorial governance voids.