Generative Relational Economics: Chapter 16 - Power, Justice, and Governance

The first part develops a mechanism-based account of economic power. It distinguishes power capacity, power exercise, power effects, and durable power relations, and analyzes resource, capability, epistemic, relational, institutional, infrastructural, symbolic, temporal, and exit forms of power. The analysis then turns to the reproduction of power and to manufactured vulnerability, emphasizing the historical mechanisms through which dependency, restricted access, limited exit, classification, institutional entrapment, and accumulated disadvantage can become persistent. The chapter subsequently develops three complementary normative perspectives: distributive, relational, and generative justice. Distribution is extended beyond resources to include capabilities, access, relational opportunity, participation, and future possibility. Relational justice evaluates recognition, reciprocity, participation, non-domination, continuity, effective exit, and the terms under which unequal relations are formed and sustained. Generative justice examines how economic arrangements shape capacities, opportunity structures, option spaces, future possibilities, and intergenerational inheritances while preserving the distinction between generativity and moral worth. Historical justice further addresses path dependence, inherited advantage and constraint, repair, restitution, historical re-epistemization, and future recognizability. The latter part of the chapter develops governance as a layered architecture operating across relations, generative processes, constraints and capacities, near-critical conditions, institutions, law, participation, heterogeneous values, and adaptive evolution. Particular attention is given to relational lifecycle governance, value transmission and capture, reversibility, institutional learning, legal protection of generative conditions, contestability, limits of universal aggregation, and governance under uncertainty. The final section identifies the epistemic dimensions of governance, including knowledge, classification, evidential access, attention, and orientation, and establishes the transition to the subsequent analysis of knowledge and the epistemic economy. The chapter proposes power, justice, and governance as mutually connected yet non-reducible dimensions of economic analysis. GRE thereby provides a framework for studying how economic relations shape present distributions and vulnerabilities while also influencing the capacities, institutions, relational structures, and future possibilities through which later economic life becomes possible.