UC Berkeley

This dissertation seeks to understand whether and how regulatory compliance can be achieved in areas of state weakness. The existing literature suggests that, absent a strong and capable state, compliance with law should be irregular, particularly when legal norms differ from social norms. It also generally assumes that the law is widely known and understood and that all parties are similarly situated to comply with it, assumptions that are untenable in areas of state weakness and where poverty is widespread. Utilizing a natural experiment along the open India-Nepal border, I examine compliance with three different regulations—those related to conservation, education and child labor. My large-N survey and qualitative data indicate that in areas of state weakness inaccurate legal knowledge and widespread poverty are significant barriers to widespread regulatory compliance, but that states that design and implement their regulations pragmatically can work around these obstacles and achieve widespread compliance at relatively little cost. In the cases I examined, regulatory pragmatism involves avoiding bureaucratic principal-agent problems and designing for legal knowledge dissemination via delegated enforcement or through local leaders. It also involves taking steps to reduce the cost of compliance for the poor so that they can afford to both comply and meet their own basic needs. The implications of these findings are potentially far-reaching. They suggest that regulatory pragmatism can guide weak or under-funded states to effective legal design and implementation choices in a variety of contexts. As a result, these states should be able to generate large-scale compliance in the absence of significant state capacity.