II-01 — Form Without Function: A Cross-Field Convergence in the Study of Implementation Failure

This paper asks whether independent research literatures — working without contact with one another — have described the same implementation phenomena under different names. It establishes, at the level of observation, that several unconnected literatures in development economics, public policy, and organisation and standards research have each documented a pattern in which an organisation or government achieves the visible, certifiable form of a functioning system without the underlying substance following (decoupling), evidenced across four independent cases spanning isomorphic mimicry, symbolic implementation, ceremonial compliance, and a governance case from Africa's creative economy sector. A separate set of literatures — spanning 1970s U.S. federal policy analysis, 1990s information-infrastructure studies, sustainability-governance research, and tourism-destination research — documents a structurally different pattern: components of a system left unconnected, with no actor, in whatever institutional form, responsible for connecting them (disconnection). Having compared the two patterns and distinguished both from a third, excluded pattern (path-dependent lock-in), the paper advances an analytical contribution: it identifies "unassigned dependencies" as a plausible mechanism linking observed disconnection to observed decoupling, demonstrating this bridge against each disconnection case individually rather than asserting it in general terms. The paper is explicitly diagnostic rather than prescriptive: it does not address how coordination structures should be designed, a question on which it notes several literatures identify real design risks and boundary conditions without taking a position on them. The paper's conclusion is that the observed fragmentation across the literatures it examines is a fragmentation of language rather than of underlying phenomena, and that implementation research may lack a shared descriptive vocabulary capable of naming recurring structures independently of disciplinary tradition — a claim scoped explicitly to the literatures examined and not extended beyond the sample.