Towards Generative Relational Economics: A Preliminary Research Programme

This article introduces Generative Relational Economics (GRE) as a preliminary research programme rather than a completed economic theory. Its starting point is historical. Modern economics developed under conditions in which scarce resources were commonly allocated among comparatively stable entities such as persons, households, firms, and states. Those abstractions remain indispensable, but contemporary transformations increasingly expose their limits. Globalized production, digital platforms, and artificial intelligence alter the scarcity of symbolic production, knowledge, and productive intelligence while many mechanisms of livelihood, recognition, and resource access remain tied to employment and comparative capability. AI also destabilizes inherited assumptions about the economic subject and makes persistent capability asymmetry difficult to ignore: human and artificial subjects may coexist under differences of knowledge, prediction, coordination, and productive capacity that are neither easily eliminable nor necessarily desirable to eliminate. The resulting problem is not asymmetry alone, but how it is converted through economic relations into dependency, exclusion, authority, resource concentration, or generative opportunity. GRE responds by shifting attention from allocation outcomes alone to the evolving relational structures through which resources and plural forms of value are generated, propagated, converted, recirculated, dissipated, and made capable of generating further possibilities. It does not reject entities, allocation, markets, or existing economics. It asks what becomes visible when entity-level interventions are also treated as relational interventions and when evaluation includes effects on future generative capacities. GRE draws on ontology and epistemology, aesthetics and epistemic orientation, relational and process thought, historical materialism, capability and care approaches, generative justice, and formal traditions in dynamical systems, complexity, networks, and fields. These traditions are treated as resources rather than collapsed into a single lineage. The article states GRE's disciplinary identity: its problem domain, characteristic questions, modes of inquiry, practical orientation, normative constraints, boundaries, and cumulative research programme. Its central proposal is that economics should ask not only who receives resources or what output follows, but what relational world an intervention helps generate, how value changes as it moves through that world, and how the intervention changes the conditions of subsequent generation. This statement remains deliberately programmatic and does not provide a complete formal model, a universal metric of generativity, or a final ontology of economic subjects and relations.