Abstract
Purpose: This paper addresses an underexplored dimension of public procurement governance: the structural separation between procurement documentation that signals procedural legitimacy and documentation that reliably evidences decision-making integrity. Termed documentary decoupling, this phenomenon describes the condition in which procurement records appear formally complete yet do not constitute authentic, traceable evidence of how procurement decisions were actually made. The study aims to examine the institutional and organisational conditions through which documentary decoupling emerges or is constrained within Nigerian public sector procurement, thereby advancing understanding of how institutional forces are materially enacted through documentary artefacts.
Design/methodology/approach: The study adopts an interpretivist, qualitative research design grounded in neo-institutional theory. An abductive analytical strategy is employed, combining theory-informed thematic analysis with openness to emergent patterns. Data will be generated through semi-structured interviews with approximately 23 procurement officers across federal and state ministries, departments, and agencies (MDAs) in Nigeria. Purposive sampling will ensure cadre-stratified representation, capturing both senior officers with oversight responsibilities and operational officers engaged in day-to-day documentation. Thematic analysis, guided by a structured codebook aligned to documentary decoupling mechanisms, will proceed until thematic saturation is achieved. The analytical approach includes negative case analysis to identify boundary conditions on the documentary decoupling proposition.
Findings: As a developmental paper, the study does not yet report empirical findings. The paper advances the conceptual and methodological architecture of the proposed investigation, including the documentary decoupling construct, a three-mechanism theoretical model (retrospective assembly, version proliferation, and custody weakness), and a rigorous qualitative design for empirical examination.
Originality/value: The paper makes a theoretical contribution by extending neo-institutional theory's decoupling concept from the organisational level to the material level of the documentary artefact. Prior institutional theory has explained compliance failure as a policy-practice gap; this study proposes that decoupling is enacted through specific documentary mechanisms. The paper also addresses a contextual gap in the procurement governance literature, where documentation integrity failure in sub-Saharan African public institutions remains undertheorised and empirically underdeveloped. The proposed study is positioned to offer the first systematic, interview-based examination of documentary decoupling in Nigerian federal and state MDAs.