Most “institution-building” projects fail in the same invisible way: they import institutions as if legitimacy, consent, and local memory were optional details. This paper names and formalizes that failure mode: the Institutional Transplant Trap.Using Zero Leap Theory (ZLT), it shows why copying “best-practice” models into high-memory societies—without sovereign consent and local alignment—often produces institutional rejection: isomorphic mimicry, dependency loops, Potemkin compliance, and escalating intervention intensity that converts into entropy (waste, instability, tail risk) instead of capacity.You’ll get a compact, operational audit that can be applied before millions (or lives) are burned: gate-based diagnostics (consent/permeability, alignment/legitimacy, memory/hysteresis, observability), testable predictions and falsifiers, and a minimal set of safeguards that separate “strong-looking” reforms from structurally admissible ones.If you work in policy, development, governance, security, or institutional reform, this is a fast read that turns ideology-heavy debates into checkable structure—and helps you avoid interventions that succeed on paper while degrading the system over time.
DANNY YUBI DAGOGLIANO (Fri,) studied this question.