Routing and Distributed Inquiry in Environmental Governance: Delivering Reports under an Incomplete Structure

The event layer developed earlier in this series leaves two questions open by design. An emitting party names the parties it believes a change affects, and that naming is a revisable claim and not a routing instruction, so an arrangement must complete the delivery; and a report asserts consequence without prescribing a response, so an arrangement must have some means of doing more than delivering when more is warranted. This paper takes up both. The method is conceptual, with one small quantitative observation. On routing, the paper distinguishes three modes by what each requires and what each costs: delivery to parties the emitter declared, delivery along correspondences established from paired records, and delivery inferred from structural adjacency where no correspondence has been established. The modes trade reach against precision, and the paper's central observation is that the trade is not symmetric: because the physical structure of a field is incomplete in every party's hands, reach can be bought only by delivering to parties for whom the report is irrelevant, and the marginal volume required per additional coupling reached rises steeply, while the cost of that volume falls on receivers as the habituation that the event layer identifies as its characteristic decay mode. Routing breadth is therefore a governed parameter trading blindness against habituation, and neither end of its range is safe. On inquiry, the paper proposes a bounded, question-relative process that an arrangement may open when a report warrants more than attention, which tasks observation under the duty to look, assembles the holdings that bear on the question with disagreement preserved, and terminates in an action, a finding that the material does not warrant one, or a determination of what could not be established. The paper argues that inquiry has an epistemic function beyond the question it answers, since an inquiry that establishes a coupling adds it to the carriage map, so an arrangement learns its own structure from the inquiries it runs. The paper treats strategic silence and the corruption of routing observables inside the design and not as afterthoughts, surveys the literatures on information routing, on regulatory escalation, and on inquiry design, and identifies the residue. It reports no empirical study.