Whether nationally distinctive regulatory arrangements can survive global liberalization pressure remains unsettled. The comparative financialization literature establishes that national trajectories hold out but says little about the internal political process that produces such divergence. This paper explains South Korea’s contestation over the institutional arrangement of Geum-San Bunri (GSB)—the statutory separation of industrial and financial capitals—over four decades. Using explaining-outcome process-tracing, the analysis reconstructs socio-political coalitions, resources, and framing strategies at work in each of the five key phases. Two findings emerge. Substantively, GSB’s regulatory reach has narrowed through accumulated exceptions—a trajectory that layering describes accurately in broad outline. However, this path has not been monotonic; the industrial-capital ownership ceiling rose in 2009 and returned to its prior level in 2013. Formally, its status has remained unresolved for forty-four years, the principle continuing to organize every liberalization debate without ever being settled in either direction. The paper theorizes this combination as contested adaptation, a trajectory-level pattern specifying the political conditions under which layering fails to cumulate into displacement. It argues that Korea’s developmental state legacy persists not as inertia but as a heterogeneous configuration of moral, epistemic, and mobilizational resources actively reproduced in institutional changes.