This paper advances a field-theoretic framework for understanding policy implementation failure in hyper-dense, post-colonial cities when quantity-based waste charging is layered onto unreformed socio-spatial and institutional fields. Drawing on policy failure scholarship (McConnell, 2010a, 2010b; Bovens & 't Hart, 1996; Matland, 1995) and Bourdieu's practice theory, it demonstrates that Hong Kong's suspended Municipal Solid Waste Charging Scheme failed not from rejection of the polluter-pays principle, but from structural misalignment between a thin pricing instrument and the durable habitus of convenience disposal, ambiguous enforcement authority, and weak state symbolic capital. Three contributions follow. First, the field-restructuring precondition hypothesis: economic instruments in dense vertical cities require prior reconfiguration of infrastructure, institutional positions, and bodily hexis before pricing can function. Second, through comparison with Seoul, Taipei, Singapore and European PAYT schemes, Hong Kong's failure reflects an accelerated, compressed version of implementation challenges visible elsewhere when field transformation is elided. Third, preparatory measures—GREEN@Community infrastructure and Green$ incentives—generated unintended cultural and symbolic capital around recycling, creating a partial habitus shift despite the scheme's suspension, complicating linear narratives of policy failure. Environmental governance in dense Asian cities must be reconceptualised as long-term field restructuring rather than rapid behavioural levering.