Capacity Beyond Coercion

State capacity is often equated with coercion. The literature suggests that compliance with law is unlikely in areas where the state cannot coerce compliance. Utilizing extensive data collected in adjacent districts in India and Nepal, and exploring three different regulatory arenas, this book demonstrates that coercively weak states can significantly increase compliance by behaving pragmatically and designing implementation around known barriers to compliance. One such barrier is imperfect legal knowledge. Though legal knowledge is often assumed to be accurate, this assumption is problematic. Principal-agent problems prevent many weak states from behaving consistently, and target populations often lack education and competent legal advice. As a result,they struggle to learn about the law. States that employ regulatory pragmatism, however, may circumvent this compliance barrier. They do so by designing implementation strategies for on-the-ground realities. The book explores two such efforts-delegated enforcement and information dissemination through local leaders. The data indicate that strategies consistent with regulatory pragmatism, in contrast to those that are legally doctrinaire or deterrence-based, significantly increase legal knowledge and compliance, even where the state is locally weak. This is demonstrated in through a primary case involving compliance with conservation law, as well as through two shadow cases involving compliance with education and child labor regulation--