ABSTRACT Governments across the developing world have adopted artificial intelligence governance instruments at high speed, though the relationship between formal adoption and the capability to operate those instruments remains poorly understood. This article asks whether the expansion of AI governance architecture across the Global South has been matched by the functional capabilities on which regulatory effectiveness depends, and what explains the answer. Drawing on panel data for 82 countries across five Global South regions and six waves of the Government AI Readiness Index, it reports that within the period of stable index architecture (2020–2024) measures of regulatory form rose by 20.3 points on a 0–100 scale while measures of functional capability rose by 0.4 points, a within‐country differential present in 90% of sample countries and surviving removal of the single step‐scored indicator of national strategy adoption. The pattern of the differential discriminates among explanations: formal adoption rose four times faster in states in the top quartile of administrative capacity than in the bottom quartile, where capability fell; the most aid‐dependent states adopted least; and the differential is unrelated to regime type. This is inconsistent with the view that legislation is simply quicker to produce than infrastructure and with the view that adoption is decoupled from performance for external audiences, and consistent with adoption conditioned on administrative capacity, in which capability in the weakest states erodes while capability in stronger states grows more slowly than the instruments that depend on it. Vietnam and India are developed as confirming and deviant cases. Cross‐national dispersion widened on both dimensions, and patterns that appear only when the 2025 wave is included cannot be separated from the redesign of the index in that year.
Why did long-horizon private investment in Brazilian water and sanitation expand after 2016 despite fragmented authority and persistent political contestation? This article places the Brazilian Development Bank (BNDES) inside, rather than outside, the credible-commitment framework. It argues that the bank operated as a credibility intermediary: it assembled service territories at investible scale, financed and coordinated project preparation, translated statutory goals into comparable contracts, and linked concessions to long-term finance. These functions complemented courts, legislatures, the national standard-setting role of the National Water and Basic Sanitation Agency (ANA), and post-award supervision by infranational regulators. Process tracing of laws, concession documents, regulatory instruments, auction records, corporate filings, and attributable investor statements shows how this architecture was repeated across the Temer, Bolsonaro, and Lula administrations, albeit under different political framings. The mechanism is sequence-sensitive but not universally necessary: Chile demonstrates an alternative route through regional utilities and a central regulator, while Colombia illustrates the continuing constraints of fragmented provision. The article also distinguishes investibility from legitimacy. Financial and contractual discipline can make commitments more legible to investors, but it neither replaces public-law oversight nor resolves disputes over affordability, participation, and the human right to water.
This article explains why the European Commission diluted the 2004 European Interoperability Framework's provisions favoring open-source software and open standards when it revised the framework in 2010. Using an extended Multiple Streams Framework with a technology stream, the study shows how pro-openness policy entrepreneurs secured the 2004 provisions and why incumbent advocacy became more effective during revision. Drawing on annotated drafts and expert interviews, the study traces actors' lobbying strategies across the problem, politics, and policy streams and examines how technology-stream developments altered the feasibility and political salience of competing solutions. The analysis shows how changing standards and licensing dynamics, incumbent advocacy, and declining political support for the earlier pro-openness package enabled a new coupling around business-model neutrality and licensing flexibility, diluting the 2004 provisions. Beyond the European case, the study informs debates on open-source artificial intelligence and advances theory on institutional dynamics in regulatory governance.
This article challenges the assumption that legal harmonization within the European Union ensures effective anti-corruption governance. Despite EU-compliant frameworks, institutional integrity remains highly uneven across subnational territories. We introduce the Regional Integrity Framework (RIF), a diagnostic approach that integrates citizen perceptions, procurement indicators, and enforcement activation measures to capture regional integrity performance. The analysis suggests that formal convergence can conceal functional divergence, as peripheral regions often exhibit weaker administrative capacity, limited oversight, and uneven institutional activation. A mixed-methods application that combines panel analysis with an illustrative comparison of Sofia and Vidin, Bulgaria, demonstrates how the RIF can diagnose territorial integrity gaps within a shared legal framework. Conceptually, the study reframes anti-corruption as a territorially embedded problem of institutional activation; methodologically, it offers a transferable framework for identifying enforcement asymmetries and governance disparities in multi-level systems.
Financial authorities have developed extensive climate-related policies, but nature-related financial policy remains less widespread. Using data on individual policy instruments across 116 jurisdictions from 2000 to 2025, this paper compares the adoption, policy areas, binding status, and source of climate- and nature-related policies. Nature-related policies appear in 27 jurisdictions, compared with 60 for climate-only policies. National nature adoption is positively associated with a larger existing body of climate and environmental financial policies, mainly through the broader environmental component rather than climate-specific policy. Climate-only policies are used more frequently in prudential supervision and credit allocation than policies that combine nature with climate or broader environmental concerns. Nature-related policies have a higher mandatory share over the full period but a lower share than climate-only policies in 2023-2025. In the European Union, broad EU-level coverage coexists with limited national issuance. The paper contributes a common framework for comparing climate and nature policies and distinguishes EU-level coverage from national policy development. The results show that the climate-nature gap concerns not only adoption, but also where policies are used, how binding they are, and which level of authority issues them.
