Beyond Regime Forms: The Anthropocentric Limit and Synthetic Externalization in Earth System Governance.

Despite radical differences in institutional design, contemporary governance systems exhibit strikingly similar long-term failure modes when confronted with Earth system limits. This article argues that these failures stem from a shared structural condition: the Anthropocentric Limit, the inability of human-centered governance architectures to reliably enforce non-negotiable survival constraints under conditions of complexity, power concentration, and delayed ecological feedback. Drawing on political philosophy, systems theory, and futures studies, the article advances a regime-transcending diagnosis using Causal Layered Analysis. It contrasts modern governance decay with historical forms of externalized legitimacy, most notably Ancient Egypt’s Ma’at, where political authority was coupled to non-human ecological feedback via the Nile. Building on this logic, the article proposes Synthetic Externalization as a contemporary, secular form of meta-governance. Synthetic Externalization relocates core ecological, fiscal, and procedural constraints from discretionary human judgment to decentralized, executable institutional infrastructure. By encoding planetary boundaries and other survival limits as institutional invariants, governance is anchored to a Safe Operating Space within which pluralistic democratic deliberation can continue without risking systemic collapse. The framework emphasizes polycentric enforcement, anticipatory constraint design, and slow meta-governance to avoid technocratic rigidity or political capture. The article contributes to earth system governance scholarship by offering a novel institutional architecture for governing planetary boundaries beyond anthropocentric regime forms, addressing the challenge of aligning political decision-making with Earth system dynamics under conditions of accelerating risk.