Adaptive Capacity in the Interregnum: Liquid Institutions, Polycentric Governance, and the Digital Architecture of Youth Empowerment in Bangladesh

Abstract

Institutional voids in Bangladesh are not temporary absences awaiting hierarchical completion. They are sedimented, densely inhabited arenas in which young people improvise, broker and adapt, and in which youth angst registers as a structured affect that converts into exit: withdrawal from formal education, platform hustling in the global gig economy, or migration. This article reads the empirical record of that exit — a youth NEET rate of 29.8 percent, 87 percent of it female, and Bangladesh's position as the second-largest supplier of online labor — through feminist standpoint epistemology and the critique of algorithmic management as digital biopower. Governance architectures that treat voids as scandals to be closed by more hierarchy reproduce the opacity they claim to remedy. The alternative proposed is a design for liquid institutions resting on five relational necessities: modularity, interoperability, provisionality with feedback intensity, subsidiarity with networked escalation, and relational and epistemic openness. These are operationalized as a three-layer governance stack: a thin but robust constitutional and fiduciary core, modular platforms bound by algorithmic due process, and dense relational infrastructures organized on polycentric principles and built on the Union Digital Centres. Regulatory sandboxes, stackable micro-credentials and blended finance rails are the concrete means by which the knowledge carried by angst and exit re-enters public reason. Liquid institutions are not a preference for fluidity over order. They are the minimum condition for converting voids into adaptive capacity. KSCCN article, 10 October 2026. Dr. Syed Muntasir Mamun, ORCID 0000-0001-6845-2853. The views expressed are those of the author.