Criticality Detection in Distributed Environmental Governance: Relational Precursors, Standing Arrangements, and Graded Duties

Interdependent Earth–human systems contain thresholds at which small further forcing produces large and partly irreversible reconfiguration, and a governance arrangement for such systems requires warning of their approach. A substantial scientific literature supplies early warning indicators, and recent assessment reports that several major thresholds are near or crossed. This paper does not add to the indicator literature. Its subject is the step that literature leaves open: what it is for detection to be a governance function, operated as a standing arrangement whose findings carry duties, among parties none of which observes the field whole. The method is conceptual, with the statistical material taken from its owners and its conditions stated. Four positions organise the paper. Detection in an interdependent field is relational before it is local: the precursors of system-scale transition lie in the coupling structure, in rising co-movement and shared stress across subsystems, and these are visible only to an arrangement that spans parties, so the communicative structure of the field is a precondition of its warning system and not an accessory. Detection outputs should enter governance as graded standing levels with duties attached to each grade, on the model of the operating arrangements in volcanology, famine classification, and prudential supervision, and not as binary alarms. The soundness conditions of the underlying indicators are restrictive and partly institutional: entire transition classes escape them, including the rate-induced transitions treated earlier in this series, and coupled human response can mute the signatures the indicators read. And the capacity to detect is unevenly held, so a detection arrangement inherits the distribution of instruments and records, a matter developed as a justice question in the next paper of the series. The paper surveys the early warning literature and its critiques, spatial and network extensions, systemic-stress measurement in finance, and the operating institutional instances, states what each owns, and identifies the residue. It reports no empirical study and establishes no statistical result.