Compliance boundary work and international standards: A case study of a small financial centre

Compliance with international standards is often portrayed as a technical endpoint, yet in practice it is fluid, contested, and continuously negotiated. This paper reconceptualises compliance as a process of compliance boundary work to theorise situated efforts by actors to construct, operationalise, and reconfigure the boundary between compliance and noncompliance. Drawing on thirty interviews and documentary analysis in a small financial centre under intense global scrutiny, the study demonstrates how compliance emerges through recursive evaluations, selective external scrutiny, and strategic adaptations shaped by national capacities and priorities. The paper makes three contributions. First, it theorises the compliance/noncompliance boundary as a dynamic construct, extending processual views of compliance by revealing how this boundary is actively produced and reshaped through practice. Second, it demonstrates that compliance work is not confined to formal regulators but involves external actors, such as media, whose interventions reconfigure the regulatory landscape beyond official evaluation frameworks. Third, it demonstrates how efforts typically framed as “regulatory capacity building” often take the form of redistributing responsibilities, borrowing external expertise, and constructing new documentary infrastructures, rather than developing durable local capabilities. These consequences challenge the assumption that international standards automatically strengthen national regulatory capacity. Together, these insights advance boundary work theory into the domain of transnational regulation and illuminate the politics of global governance in resource-constrained contexts.