Preserving Life, Transforming Power: Civil Commons, Living Coordination, and the Conditions of Corrigible Transition

How can societies dismantle arrangements that reproduce preventable harm without destroying the essential capacities embedded within those arrangements? This question becomes acute when institutions are simultaneously harmful and indispensable: they control services, infrastructure, knowledge or livelihoods that people cannot safely abandon. This paper develops a proposed resolution grounded in the Civilizational Healing research programme. Its central principle is to preserve and improve essential life-enabling functions while making the authority controlling them accountable and, where necessary, replaceable. The proposed mechanism connects three processes: protection that reduces coercive dependence; organized capacity to secure legitimate changes in power; and safeguards that preserve the possibility of correcting the successor. Financial resolution, energy-supplier administration, Jackson’s drinking-water intervention and the Montreal Protocol illustrate components of this separation, without validating the complete framework. Through critical conceptual analysis and a purposive examination of institutional precedents, the paper proposes binding transition agreements linking continuity, resources, changes in control, affected-party standing and independent review. It also examines political obstruction, successor capture, ecological burden displacement and the limits of gradual reform. The contribution is an institutional and political design hypothesis, not a universal transition formula: societies may become more capable of changing harmful arrangements when essential protection no longer depends on preserving the dominance of their current controllers.