Why Strong Governance Still Drifts: How Institutions Quietly Lose Alignment

Tagline: A structural explanation of how capable institutions diverge from declared intent. Paper Description: This paper formalises Translation Drift as a cumulative structural mechanism.Drift arises at translation nodes where intent is reinterpreted across heterogeneous time horizons under bounded rationality. Small local optimisations accumulate into systemic divergence.The paper reframes strategic drift as an emergent property of layered governance rather than a failure of leadership.It provides the mechanistic core of the programme and grounds subsequent measurement and design work. Programme description: This paper is part of the Coherence Programme, a research series examining how institutional decision systems maintain—or lose—fidelity to declared intent under conditions of complexity, scale, and delayed feedback. The programme models institutional governance as an Operating Spine linking Purpose, Capabilities, Value Drivers, Strategy, Portfolio, and Signals. Across this spine, intent is translated through discrete interfaces where cumulative divergence (Translation Drift), measurable alignment (Translation Coherence), and governance intervention (Interpretive Maintenance) can be structurally analysed. Supporting materials, working documents, and programme structure are available via the Open Science Framework (OSF): https://osf.io/9cvky/ Version 1.01 (Feb 2026)Minor theoretical positioning refinements, boundary clarification, formalisation schematic, and language precision updates. No change to core argument. This version supersedes V1.0 and introduces no change to the core theoretical claim. Version 1.02 update: This version adds an explicit cross-reference to the AI-Augmented Impact Frames architectural paper to clarify the conceptual positioning of this article within the broader research programme. No arguments, definitions, figures, or claims have been changed. The revision improves scholarly traceability and programme coherence only. Version 2.00: This release consolidates the manuscript within the full research programme structure. Cross-paper terminology has been harmonised, the unit-of-analysis statement has been standardised across the series, and reference architecture has been aligned. No changes have been made to the formal decision-learning architecture, measurement logic, boundary conditions, or theoretical claims. Version 2.01: consolidates the manuscript within the full research programme structure. Cross-paper terminology has been harmonised, titles and references have been aligned with the programme statement, and internal cross-references have been updated. No changes have been made to the formal decision-learning architecture, measurement logic, boundary conditions, or theoretical claims. Empirical studies, measurement instruments, and field applications are in preparation and will be released in subsequent linked records. Version 2.02: Programme Consolidation Update: This version consolidates the manuscript within the unified Coherence Programme structure.Titles, terminology, and internal cross-references have been harmonised across the series to stabilise the programme’s core constructs: Translation Drift (mechanism) Translation Coherence (metric) Interpretive Maintenance (governance function) Distributed Coherence (theoretical integration) No changes have been made to the formal architecture, boundary conditions, methodological logic, or theoretical claims.The update improves cross-paper traceability, indexing consistency, and conceptual coherence across the programme.