Mind the Gap: The Political Economy of the Policy Design-Enforcement Divide

Abstract

Policy failure is commonly attributed to weak design or political contestation during adoption. However, most political economy frameworks—largely derived from Western institutional settings—overemphasise coalition-building to pass policy, implicitly assuming that the rule of law exists for post-legislative implementation, and so opposition is concentrated in parliament and pre-legislative committees. Once policy is enacted, compliance by actors and enforcement by agencies is presumed. This paper challenges that assumption, arguing that in many developing countries the primary site of policy distortion is not adoption but implementation. Legislative arenas often exhibit limited engagement with policy detail, and distributive conflicts intensify only after formal passage, when a distinct set of powerful constituencies operating at local or sectoral levels—including frontline professionals and procurement actors such as doctors, contractors, and public works suppliers—shape how policy is executed in practice. These actors typically lack influence in policy design, yet hold material power over implementation, where incentives for compliance, enforcement, and sanctioning diverge sharply from those at the legislative or formal design stage. We use an operationally robust definition of political settlements: not as powerful elite pushing policy adoption, but as configurations of power across multiple policy stages, including implementation, where actors possess varying combinations of Power, Capability, and Interest (PCI). This framework conceptualises Power as relative, Capability as the ability to earn and sustain livelihoods, and Interest as self-incentives to follow rules and enforce them horizontally (peer to peer enforcement in their self-interest). We demonstrate that implementation failure emerges when the power, capability, and interest of actors is configured in a way that incentivises rule breaking. Actors with a different combination of power and capabilities will behave differently depending on their interests. In such contexts those with formal enforcement responsibilities are often unable to implement rules. Policy has to be designed in such a way that there are internal incentives of actors to get to collective goals of social welfare. This panel addresses the challenge of enforcing policy in adverse contexts where actors are involved in a dense network of relationships and these shape behaviour in terms of policy uptake, even where policy design seems robust. Policy design therefore has to be both feasible and impactful. The papers presented employ diverse political economy methods, including comparative case studies, lab-in-the-field experiments, and pilot policy interventions, with a shared emphasis on policy designs that improve implementation feasibility and real-world execution.

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