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We trace the rise and collapse of the Tuning Central Asian Higher Education Area (TuCAHEA) project (2010–2016), a EUR 3.7 million EU-funded initiative engineered to harmonize higher education across five Central Asian states. The coordination is now hollow. We develop the concept of “administrative Institutional Adherence circuits”—temporary cross-border networks of officials, shared vocabularies, and forged personal ties that enable policy coordination during funded project phases and corrode the moment external resources withdraw. Through comparative documentary analysis of Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan from 2010 to 2023, we reconstruct how TuCAHEA assembled dense inter-ministerial networks and a shared policy language, a trajectory that peaked with the 2014 Ministerial Communiqué signed by all five governments. That architecture fractured. Three interlocking mechanisms—personnel discontinuity, fiscal constraints, and geopolitical reorientation toward China and Russia—eroded the coordination capacity within seven years. Kazakhstan selectively absorbed elements aligned with its national strategy; Kyrgyzstan’s adoption stalled under capacity gridlock and recurring political instability. Neither country institutionalized TuCAHEA outcomes. We extend norm localization theory (Acharya, 2004; Anafinova, 2024) by demonstrating that in weakly institutionalized post-Soviet contexts, localized norms demand continuous administrative reinforcement or they fossilize into irrelevance, and we press against regionalization theory’s tacit assumption that project-phase achievements yield durable institutional structures.