Hollow Compliance Under Central Mandates: An Organizational Decoupling Model

Abstract

Subnational governments across Asia routinely meet the targets attached to central agricultural technology mandates while the capabilities those targets were meant to create fail to appear. Implementation theory anticipates shortfall and policy capacity theory anticipates under-delivery; neither anticipates compliance that is hollow. This note resolves the anomaly by importing the distinction between policy-practice and means-ends decoupling into the comparative study of subnational politics, and by identifying field opacity as the condition selecting between them. Its central move is to supply what field-level opacity accounts lack: a theory of why units facing the same regime, field and rules diverge. Four subnational conditions, fiscal autonomy, coordination, accountability horizon and analytical capacity, determine which form of decoupling occurs and how severe it is. Nine propositions are derived with falsification conditions, and Vietnam and China generate testable expectations. In opaque fields, tightening targets should widen rather than narrow the gap between compliance and achievement.