The Failure of Regulatory Impact Assessment Reform in Georgia: An Isomorphic Mimicry Perspective

Regulatory Impact Assessment (RIA) has been promoted globally as a cornerstone of good governance, designed to ensure evidence-based policymaking and enhance state accountability. In Georgia, multiple international donors supported the institutionalization of RIA from the mid-2000s onward. Despite the enactment of legal and methodological frameworks, the reform did not yield a functioning national system and, by 2024, had effectively collapsed, abandoned by both donors and the government. This paper examines why a globally celebrated instrument failed in an ostensibly favourable context. Using a process-tracing case study of Georgia, the paper employs the concept of Isomorphic Mimicry to show how donor-endorsed reforms can persist as performative compliance - securing resources and external legitimacy - while producing limited outcomes. In this effort, the article showcases how, in parallel with its formal adoption into law, the reform fell into a “capability trap”, with civil servants overloaded and donor-driven technical support proliferating. Thus, the case illustrates how mimicry-driven reform can persist for years without achieving substantive results, sustained by a coalition of political actors, donors, and other stakeholders with short-term incentives. The analysis further traces how political-bureaucratic actors preserved prevailing routines by designing and exploiting legislative loopholes that circumscribed RIA’s formal effects. This study advances Isomorphic Mimicry and governance reform scholarship by specifying conditions sustaining mimicry (particularly, high donor density, a well-developed system of external and internal reform enablers, and bureaucratic hedging via legislative loopholes), tracing regulatory decoupling that turns RIA into box-ticking, and using Georgia’s donor-cooperation suspension as a stress test highlighting the centrality of donors in mimetic reforms.