Performative formalization of coordination in urban tourism governance: institutional decoupling and recursive obstruction in Tehran

Urban tourism governance relies on networks of public, private, and informal actors, yet coordinating bodies often multiply without producing binding decisions or joint action. Drawing on Charmaz's constructivist grounded theory, this study examines how coordination is formally maintained but substantively weakened in Tehran's urban tourism governance. Thirty semi-structured interviews with governmental, municipal, private-sector, and academic actors were analyzed through initial, focused, and theoretical coding, constant comparison, and memo-writing. Three categories were constructed – institutional fragmentation and contested authority; ritualised coordination and institutional decoupling; and erosion of formal networks and replacement by informal governance – yielding the core category of performative formalisation of coordination: a condition in which committees, councils, platforms, and documents display coordination while remaining detached from commitment, conflict resolution, and accountability. The study extends institutional decoupling to inter-organisational tourism networks and specifies a recursive mechanism in which informalization reproduces the fragmentation that generated performative coordination, offering a diagnostic lens for fragmented, authority-ambiguous settings.