Evidentiary Resilience

Abstract As decision pathways come to depend on distributed technologies, cloud environments, evolving data architectures and third-party services, evidence can no longer be treated as a stock of records. This paper introduces evidentiary resilience as a distinct dimension of institutional resilience. It argues that accountability rests on an evidence infrastructure: the organisational, technological and governance arrangements through which evidence is generated, validated, preserved, connected and recovered over time. Evidentiary resilience is the capacity of that infrastructure to remain sufficiently robust through technological change, organisational evolution and growing complexity. The paper identifies recurring modes of degradation (reconstructibility drift, validation drift, fragmentation, contextual decay, attribution degradation, accountability dependency) and argues that the possibility of irreversible loss is the common feature that gives them their preventive significance. Building on prior work on explainability, opacity and institutional reconstructibility, the paper addresses the continuity conditions that allow accountability to remain effective through time. Its central proposition is simple: accountability cannot be more resilient than the evidentiary infrastructure that sustains it. Evidentiary resilience is therefore a necessary, though not sufficient, condition of durable accountability.