Compliance without recovery: A diagnostic perspective on stock-dominated environmental governance

Environmental governance often treats visible compliance as evidence that recovery is underway. In stock-dominated systems, this inference can fail: legacy nutrients, radionuclide inventories and orbital debris may continue to structure future risk after annual inputs, exposures or mitigation obligations have been reduced or satisfied. This Perspective develops a diagnostic framework for this risk, which we call compliance without recovery. The concept is not proposed as a substitute for established work on implementation gaps, policy decoupling, symbolic compliance, shifting baselines, indicator substitution, cumulative effects or adaptive governance. Its contribution is narrower: it reorganizes these mechanisms around a stock-dominance problem in which short-cycle governance metrics can become detached from the slower cumulative trajectories they are meant to alter. Three environmentally anchored sentinel regimes - nutrient-legacy watersheds, managed radiological contamination and orbital debris commons - are used as diagnostic stress tests rather than representative cases. We specify a six-condition test requiring evidence of persistent stock, constrained reset, visible compliance metric, weak or delayed stock contraction, recalibration pressure and institutional claims of success despite incomplete recovery. The framework supports cautious inference only when these conditions co-occur. Governing stock-dominated systems therefore requires stock-sensitive authorization, long-horizon accountability and explicit scrutiny of baseline, threshold, timeline and metric revision.