Generative Relational Economics - Chapter 3: Constitution and Research Programme of Generative Relational Economics

This chapter provides a preliminary constitution of Generative Relational Economics (GRE) as an emerging economic research programme. Building on the historical conditions examined in Chapter 1 and the intellectual lineages reconstructed in Chapter 2, it specifies the problem-space, analytical objects, epistemic commitments, methodological pluralism, normative interfaces, and cumulative research architecture through which GRE can operate as a coherent yet revisable programme of inquiry. The chapter begins by distinguishing GRE from the broader Generative Relational framework and locating economics as its primary disciplinary domain. It introduces a minimal structure of change, structure, constraint, and difference for examining ontological emergence under conditions of ontological suspension. It then develops a plural taxonomy of GRE objects, including economic subjects, relations, capacities, values, institutions, fields, trajectories, and symbolic representations, together with an explicitly multiscalar conception of economic inquiry. GRE's distinctive analytical perspective is organized around the study of how allocation and intervention are mediated by relational configurations and how these configurations generate, propagate, convert, recirculate, dissipate, or extract forms of value and capability. Particular attention is given to the formation of economic subjects, the orientation of generative processes, methodological and epistemic pluralism, intervention under incomplete knowledge, normative evaluation, persistent asymmetry, heterogeneous subjects, and relations across partially commensurable forms of intelligence, temporality, vulnerability, and value. The chapter further specifies the boundaries of GRE in relation to mainstream economics, political economy, economic sociology, complexity and evolutionary economics, capability approaches, ecological and regenerative economics, generative justice, and general Generative Relational Theory. It proposes criteria for GRE research contributions, an architecture for cumulative knowledge production, conditions for productive internal disagreement, and a set of open theoretical and methodological problems. The chapter concludes with a preliminary constitution of GRE understood not as a closed doctrine but as a revisable research compact. GRE is characterized as a domain-specific economic programme concerned with how economic relations generate, reproduce, distribute, transform, and foreclose later capacities, values, subjects, structures, and conditions of possibility. Its constitution therefore combines analytical commitments with explicit mechanisms for empirical, theoretical, methodological, normative, and historical revision.