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

This chapter develops a generative relational account of power, justice, and governance within Generative Relational Economics (GRE). It begins from relational asymmetry while distinguishing asymmetry from power itself. A relational asymmetry becomes power-relevant when it participates in directionally organized deformation of the accessible, feasible, or comparatively weighted future possibilities of another history-bearing relational entity or of a shared configuration. Relational power requires a further historical condition: the resulting power organization must acquire sufficient persistence together with causal and generative efficacy within the relational system. This distinction separates transient power-relevant episodes from relationally realized power and permits reciprocal, distributed, latent, and structurally mediated forms of power to be analyzed without reducing power to scalar possession or overt command. The chapter subsequently examines manifestation, comparison, and reflexive power. Relational power can become epistemically accessible through symbolic, embodied, institutional, infrastructural, and other manifestations, while attempted transformations and historical evidence can reveal power that remains weakly visible in ordinary observation. Comparative judgments such as "more powerful than" are treated as historically generated structures whose rankings, metrics, and symbolic forms may themselves become performative and participate in later power formation. The analysis then differentiates economic forms of power, examines mechanisms of reproduction, and introduces generative-landscape deformation, power-compatible regimes, adaptive persistence, and power dissolution as mechanisms through which power can reproduce, transform, or lose efficacy across historical continuations. These constructions provide the basis for the chapter's treatment of justice and governance. Justice is analyzed through distributive, procedural, relational, epistemic, temporal, and generative dimensions without deriving normative conclusions directly from asymmetry. Governance is correspondingly understood as intervention within historically structured relational systems whose power configurations, feedback processes, and future possibilities remain only partially observable and controllable. Throughout the chapter, mathematical and dynamical formalisms remain representational resources under ontological suspension rather than claims about ultimate social ontology. The resulting framework places power, justice, and governance within a shared account of how relational structures condition, reproduce, and transform future economic possibility.