Capacity beyond Coercion Regulatory Pragmatism and Compliance along the India-Nepal Border

State capacity is often equated with coercion. However, history has shown that it is extremely difficult for states with weak capacity to ensure compliance with their laws.

In Capacity beyond Coercion, Susan L. Ostermann examines the largely unexplored capacities that allow coercively weak states to promote law-following behavior. Utilizing extensive data collected in adjacent districts in India and Nepal, she demonstrates how coercively weak states can significantly increase compliance by behaving pragmatically and designing implementation strategies around known barriers to compliance. In particular, she examines variation in compliance with conservation, education, and child labor regulations, investigating the mechanisms by which the Indian and Nepali states have, despite limited enforcement capacity, secured compliance with regulations that run counter to customary norms and to the self-interest of target populations. She argues that one such barrier is imperfect legal knowledge and shows how states that have engaged in what she terms "regulatory pragmatism" may circumvent this compliance barrier. They do so by designing implementation strategies for on-the-ground realities. Exploring two such efforts--delegated enforcement and information dissemination through local leaders, Ostermann demonstrates that states that suffer from limited coercive capacity but behave pragmatically can still bring about large-scale compliance.

Given that many states have weak enforcement capacity, the findings in Capacity beyond Coercion point a way forward for more effective and responsive governance throughout the developing world.

Susan L. Ostermann is Assistant Professor of Global Affairs & Political Science in the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame. She completed her PhD in the Travers Department of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. She also holds a law degree from
Stanford Law School and worked for several years as a practicing litigator at O'Melveny & Myers LLP, focusing on class actions and intellectual property disputes. While Professor Ostermann's research focuses mainly on regulatory compliance in South Asia, she is broadly interested in understanding
laws and norms and how they change and interact. Towards this end, she has published papers on inter-caste marriage and the role of skin color in Indian politics. She has also published work on compliance with anti-FGM/C law in Burkina Faso, Mali and Kenya, on the historical roots of conservatism in
Indian political thought, the development and expansion of the Indian Election Commission, variation in sex-ratios throughout the subcontinent, the Indian bureaucracy, state capacity in South Asia, and the 2014 Indian general election. Ostermann's work has been published in Law & Society Review;
Governance; Asian Survey; Studies in Comparative International Development; the Journal of Race, Ethnicity and Politics; Studies in Indian Politics; and Law & Policy.