Distributed authority is a governance model in which power is structured to resist concentration, and the authority to decide is kept local to those a decision affects and legible to everyone it binds. It is the movement's structural answer to the concentration of power that Impactivism diagnoses in the wider economy.
Principle
Authority left unstructured centralizes by default. A governance system meant to serve people, communities, and planetary well-being — rather than the accumulation of power — must therefore be arranged so that concentration is resisted by design, not merely discouraged by intention. Two properties define the model: agency held as locally as responsibility allows, and the distribution of power kept visible enough to be checked.
What the model requires
- Locality of decision. Each decision is placed at the smallest scale that can hold it responsibly, so that those who bear its consequences have genuine say in it.
- Legibility of power. Who holds which authority, and how it was granted, is recorded and readable. Unseen power cannot be checked; legibility is the precondition on which accountability, allocation, and consent all depend.
- No unobserved leverage. No single position accumulates enough concentrated control to rewrite the rules for its own benefit without others being positioned to see it.
Guards against
Capture — the slow bending of a system to serve whoever has accumulated the most power within it. Distributed authority does not assume good behavior; it removes the structural conditions under which capture proceeds unnoticed.
Relation to the other models
This model is foundational to the rest. Civic accountability, transparent allocation, and consent each presuppose that power is visible and reachable; where authority has already concentrated and gone dark, those mechanisms have nothing to hold onto. Legibility, established here, is what the others act upon.
Status: Adopted
Adopted as settled principle and treated as load-bearing: Civicognita, as a steward that claims no privileged authority over the value the movement creates, holds itself to it. Adoption is not completion — the specific mechanisms that enforce locality and legibility across the network are still being built. The principle is fixed; its full apparatus is designed rather than shipped.