Enabling, Constraining, Preventing, and Leaving Open: Existing Schemes of Human–Nature and Cosmic Governance under a Generative Relational Description

Governance of the relations between human activity and the wider natural and cosmic field is conducted through a large number of schemes whose vocabularies have developed separately. Precaution, adaptive governance, resilience management, environmental law, earth-system governance and the emerging arrangements for orbital sustainability each describe what they do in terms proper to themselves, and the separation obstructs the comparison of what any two of them accomplish. This paper offers a common description under which the schemes may be compared, and it offers that description for the sake of a result the comparison yields. The description takes relational change as its primitive and represents every governance scheme as a distribution of effort across four operations: enabling a change, constraining its extent, preventing its occurrence, and leaving a possibility unrealised without preventing its later realisation. The schemes are then placed against the four. The result is that the first three operations are densely occupied and the fourth is nearly empty: every tradition surveyed holds developed doctrine for permitting, limiting and forbidding, while deliberate non-occupation is everywhere recorded under a description belonging to another operation, as provisional prevention, as an instrument of learning, as prohibition within a boundary, or as an absence of demand. The paper argues that the emptiness is structural, deriving it from the accounting by which governance schemes are assessed, within which a scheme reports by exhibiting what it produced and an unrealised possibility leaves the field looking the same whether it was withheld or merely unaddressed, and it exhibits the four settings in which the missing operation is presently performed without a doctrine to support it: protected areas, dark-sky designation, unoccupied orbital regions, and deferred industrial transition. The paper closes by stating the five requirements a doctrine of the fourth operation would have to satisfy, each derived from a stated result and each assessable against an existing arrangement.