Generative Condition Governance for Environmental Change: Conditions of Generation in Interdependent Earth–Human Systems - A Preliminary Discussion

Abstract

Environmental governance addresses a field that no governing party can represent, predict, or command, and in which every governing party is itself a member. Under this condition the two classical objects of governance both fail: governing outcomes presupposes a causal model adequate to steer the system, and governing target states presupposes in addition a representation of the state space shared across parties that describe the field in incommensurable languages. This paper proposes a third object. This paper proposes a third object, the set of conditions under which trajectories are generated, and develops it as a position: generative condition governance. The method is conceptual and definitional, and the paper reports no empirical study. Conditions are defined relationally, over the topology of couplings, the distribution of access and information, buffers, permissions, and institutional rules, and the generative structure of a field is stated as a one-to-many map from conditions to admissible trajectory bundles. Three insights follow. The relational definition permits coordinated action among parties holding no common ontology of states, since a coupling can be recognised from either side of it. The one-to-many map reduces the governor's epistemic burden from predicting a trajectory to characterising an admissible set. And power relations are themselves elements of the condition set, so the position cannot treat conditions as politically neutral and must answer the objection that condition governance is power exercised at one remove. The paper's contribution is to state the object exactly, to distinguish it from the traditions that own adjacent claims, principally ordoliberal framework doctrine, constitutional political economy, mechanism design, the cultivation arguments of the epistemic tradition, capability theory, and platform generativity, and to fix the layered architecture and the open questions of a research programme built on this object. Its role in that programme is foundational: it argues for a research direction, and establishes no result.