When Reform Failure Stabilises Governance Systems: Recursive Regulation and Political Attractor Shifts in Complex Adaptive Governance

ABSTRACT This article advances a systems‐theoretical framework for understanding reform dissipation in politically governed complex adaptive systems. Rather than treating failure as deviation from intended design, the framework conceptualises reform dissipation as recursive regulation within threshold‐sensitive attractor landscapes—a reframing with significant implications for how governance scholars and practitioners analyse institutional change. The article makes three conceptual contributions. First, it refines the concept of attractors in institutional governance contexts, distinguishing between first‐order stabilisation—immediate regulatory correction that redirects reform trajectories without altering the underlying governance logic—and second‐order stabilisation, in which governance logics themselves are reinforced, deepening regulatory basins and narrowing systemic tolerance for deviation. Second, it introduces the concept of political parameter shifts to capture how electoral turnover and administrative restructuring reconfigure the topology of governance attractor landscapes, recalibrating thresholds and feedback intensity in ways not reducible to direct political intervention. Third, it integrates these constructs into a coherent analytical framework that positions political volatility as endogenous to governance dynamics rather than as external disturbance. The framework is developed through theoretical elaboration and illustrated through interpretive engagement with a longitudinal reform trajectory in a Swedish municipality, where a formally endorsed sustainability initiative gradually lost strategic traction despite sustained organisational commitment. The case serves as an analytical lens through which the framework's core dynamics—absorption, threshold crossing, recursive regulation and attractor deepening—are rendered visible and their interrelations examined. By repositioning failure as systemic feedback rather than malfunction, the study contributes a non‐linear account of institutional change to systems research. Reform trajectories emerge as unfolding within dynamically modulated regulatory landscapes rather than as succeeding or failing against fixed design criteria. Failure, in this perspective, is not anomaly but a potential manifestation of systemic coherence under political volatility.