The Sovereign Spine: A New Theory of Institutional Coherence and Agency

Tagline: Alignment without centralised control. How can complex institutions remain unified without suppressing distributed agency? Traditional theories of governance often assume that alignment requires centralised control or hierarchical enforcement. This paper proposes an alternative account in which coherence emerges as a structural property of institutional decision systems. The theory of Distributed Coherence developed here treats alignment as the outcome of how institutional intent is translated across layered decision architectures rather than imposed through authority. By linking interpretive stability to decision structures, the paper offers a framework for explaining how institutions can preserve fidelity to purpose while allowing distributed decision-making. The result is a conceptual account of institutional agency in which coherence is maintained through the architecture of translation rather than through centralised command. This paper is part of the Coherence Programme.