Interdependence and the Rewriting of Law

Moving beyond the incorrect ontology of sovereignty, into a relational world.

Photo by Shannon Potter on Unsplash

Introduction: The Limits of a Sovereign World

I think there is something fundamentally off at the core of how we understand law.

Most legal systems today are built on the idea of sovereignty. They deal with a world that is treated as if it is made up of discrete units that hold authority within clearly defined boundaries. A world where states govern territory, individuals hold rights that protect their autonomy, and corporations operate as bounded entities within markets. Law, in this framing, exists to draw lines, define ownership, assign responsibility, and step in when those lines are crossed. It is a clean model that also happens to be increasingly detached from reality.

The world we actually live in does not behave like a collection of isolated units. It behaves like a dense web of interdependent systems. The atmosphere does not respect borders. Supply chains stretch across continents. Financial systems transmit risk globally in seconds. Information flows reshape behavior across entire populations almost instantaneously, and often unpredictably. Even something as basic as food depends on an intricate mesh of ecological cycles, infrastructure, labor, and energy. None of these systems can be meaningfully understood in isolation. And yet, the law continues to treat them as if they can.

This creates a constant mismatch between how the world works and how we attempt to govern it. Environmental degradation becomes difficult to address because it does not originate within a single jurisdiction. Financial crises cascade through networks that exceed regulatory boundaries. Climate change is governed through fragmented agreements that struggle to align with the scale of the problem. These are not edge cases. They are structural failures of a system built on faulty foundations.

And they point toward something deeper than policy inefficiency. They point toward an ontological error. Law assumes that autonomy comes first and relationships come second. In practice, it is relationships that create the conditions under which autonomy is even possible.

By observing the world, we know that clean water is not an individual possession, but rather the outcome of a functioning watershed. Stable climates are not granted by states. They emerge from planetary systems that no state controls. And economic activity depends on infrastructures and supply chains that no single actor fully governs.

Once we start looking at the world this way, the limits of sovereignty become difficult to ignore. The more we realize the interconnected nature of our systems, the more strained the idea of isolated authority becomes. There is already a growing recognition of this across different fields. Elinor Ostrom’s work on commons governance shows that shared resources are often managed more effectively through collective stewardship than through centralized control. Systems theorists describe social and ecological systems as complex, adaptive networks that cannot be reduced to independent parts. Political theorists have questioned whether sovereignty still makes sense as the primary organizing principle in a globalized world.

But these insights have not yet fully, or even significantly, reshaped the legal imagination. Law still tends to translate systemic problems into conflicts between actors. It assigns responsibility within bounded jurisdictions even when causality stretches far beyond them. It treats rights as attributes that belong to individuals or entities, often detached from the systems that make those rights possible in the first place.

This essay starts from a different premise: What if law began not from sovereignty, but from interdependence? What if the basic unit of analysis was not the individual or the state, but the networks of relationships that sustain them?

That repositioning sounds abstract, but its implications are very concrete. It changes how we think about rights, responsibility, governance, and justice. It changes what the law is trying to do in the first place.

The argument I want to develop here is that the current legal ontology predicated on sovereignty is no longer adequate for the world we inhabit. A relational ontology grounded in interdependence offers a more accurate starting point, and potentially a more functional and ethical one as well.

Before proceeding, I should offer a clarification. This essay does not claim that sovereignty-based legal systems contain no relational elements. They do. International law recognizes customary norms, erga omnes obligations, and transboundary harm principles. Tort law handles distributed causality. Environmental law has experimented with watershed-based management. Human rights law acknowledges that some conditions are interdependent.

What I am claiming is different. It is that these relational elements exist within a sovereign frame that consistently warps them. They are treated as exceptions, accommodations, or pragmatic adjustments rather than as the ontological foundation. A watershed council may coordinate across borders, but when conflict escalates, authority reverts to sovereign jurisdictions. Transboundary harm principles exist because sovereignty is assumed first, then modified. The result is a system that contains glimpses of interdependence while remaining structurally committed to separation.

What is proposed here is not the invention of something new, but the inversion of what already exists asymmetrically, namely: making interdependence the rule and sovereignty the exception.

I am not trying to present a finished model. What follows is closer to a process of working something out that has bothered me for many years. I will trace how sovereignty became central to law, why it is beginning to break down, what a relational alternative might look like, where that alternative runs into problems, and how those problems might be addressed through concepts I’ve discussed in the past, like metamorphic justice and biocentric governance.

The final question is the hardest one. Even if this framework makes sense, how does something like this actually begin to take shape in a world still organized around sovereignty?

By answering this last question, I will attempt to outline something resembling a practicable framework.

The Historical Construction of Sovereignty

To understand why the law looks the way it does today, it helps to see that sovereignty is not a natural starting point. It is a historical construction that emerged under very specific conditions.

The idea that political authority should be organized around territorially bounded units took shape in Europe during a period of prolonged conflict. The Peace of Westphalia is often used as a shorthand for this change. It did not create sovereignty in a single moment, but it helped stabilize a way of thinking about political order where authority was tied to territory, and external interference in that authority was treated as illegitimate.

This was a solution to a particular problem. Europe was dealing with overlapping religious and political claims that produced constant conflict. The move toward territorial sovereignty created a way to contain that conflict by drawing boundaries and saying, in effect, that each ruler had the final say within their domain.

Over time, this logic hardened into a foundational assumption. States became the primary subjects of international law, each recognized as having exclusive authority within its borders. Legal systems developed around the idea of jurisdiction, which is really just sovereignty expressed in procedural terms. If something happens within a boundary, a particular authority has the right to decide how it is handled.

This same structure was then also extended inward. Liberal political theory took the concept of sovereignty and scaled it down to the level of the individual. Thinkers like Thomas Hobbes and John Locke approached the problem of political order by imagining individuals as fundamentally separate agents who must consent to authority in order to escape conflict. Even where they disagreed, they shared an underlying assumption that individuals are primary units, and that political structures exist to coordinate their interactions.

“The RIGHT of Nature, which writers commonly call jus naturale, is the liberty each man hath to use his own power as he will himself for the preservation of his own nature, that is to say, of his own life; and consequently of doing anything which in his own judgment and reason he shall conceive to be the aptest means thereunto.”
- Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, Chapter XIV

“Though the Earth, and all inferior Creatures be common to all Men, yet every Man has a Property in his own Person. This no Body has any Right to but himself. The Labour of his Body, and the Work of his Hands, we may say, are properly his.”
- John Locke, Second Treatise of Government, Chapter V “Of Property”

Rights emerge from this frame as protective boundaries. They define a space within which the individual is sovereign. Property law then extends this logic further by allowing individuals to exercise control over external resources as if they were extensions of themselves.

By the time modern legal systems took shape, this way of thinking was deeply embedded. Which is why corporate law follows this exact same pattern. A corporation is treated as a legal person, which means it is granted a kind of artificial sovereignty. It can own property, enter contracts, and be held liable, all within a framework that treats it as a discrete entity.

None of this is accidental. It reflects the material and social conditions under which these ideas developed. Back in the 17th Century, communication was slower, economies were more localized, and environmental impacts were predominantly believed to be contained within regions. It made sense, within that context, to organize law around clearly bounded units.

But the assumptions that made sovereignty useful are no longer stable when confronted with our updated understanding of how our planet and its plethora of sub-systems actually function. Which makes it troubling that the legal system has stubbornly refused to adapt to this development. Instead, it has layered new rules on top of the old ontology with international agreements attempting to coordinate between sovereign states, regulatory bodies trying to manage transnational flows, and courts grappling with cases that cross jurisdictions and causalities.

Sovereignty tells us who is in charge. It does not tell us how the conditions that sustain life are produced, maintained, or degraded. It assumes that those conditions exist in the background, available to be governed, rather than recognizing them as the outcome of ongoing relational processes.

This exposes a visible tension. The more we realize the extent to which interdependent systems shape our world, the more a framework built around isolated authority begins to struggle. It can still function, but it does so by constantly patching over gaps that it cannot fully account for.

The Ontological Error: The World Is Interdependent

As I delved deeper into the foundations of law, at some point, the problem stopped looking like a legal problem and started looking like a perception problem.

We can look at something as simple as a river. A river is not just a body of water moving through a channel. It is rainfall patterns, soil composition, microbial life, vegetation, upstream land use, seasonal temperature shifts, and atmospheric cycles that all interact over time. The water that flows past any given point, where we can stand and perceive it, is the visible expression of a much larger system.

Now we can extend that outward. The climate is not a collection of national weather systems. It is a planetary circulation of energy. Food systems are not local production units. They are global webs of inputs, logistics, labor, and ecological dependencies. Financial markets are not isolated exchanges. They are tightly coupled networks where signals and shocks propagate almost instantly.

Even at the level of the individual, the idea of separateness becomes difficult to sustain. Human beings are biologically entangled with microbial ecosystems. Cognition is shaped by language, culture, and social interaction. Identity itself is formed relationally over time rather than emerging in isolation.

I have argued previously, in an article titled Permeable Selfhood that this is not merely a systemic observation but a psychological and ontological one. The self is not a substance. It is a coordination of bodily, cognitive, emotional, linguistic, and historical threads. The experience of being a “self” arises from the patterned coherence of this weaving. Memory, identity, and choice are not internal functions alone; they are distributed across interactions, shaped by what others reflect back. What we call self-knowledge is always already mediated.

This has direct implications for the law. If the self is permeable and emergent rather than bounded and given, then legal frameworks built on the assumption of sovereign individuals are building on a false foundation. The rights-bearing subject of liberal jurisprudence is not a natural kind. It is a convenient fiction that has outlived its usefulness.

None of this is particularly controversial anymore. It is well established across multiple fields. Ecology has long described ecosystems as interdependent networks of organisms and environments. Systems theory treats social and biological processes as complex adaptive systems where behavior emerges from interactions rather than from isolated components. Earth system science frames the planet as a set of coupled processes that regulate conditions for life.

The problem is that the law has not caught up to this gradual change in understanding. Relationships are treated as interactions between sovereign units. But if relationships are what actually constitute the system, then this ordering is backwards. The system does not emerge from the parts. The parts emerge from the system.

This has practical consequences. When the law tries to assign responsibility, it looks for identifiable actors. When it tries to regulate behavior, it draws boundaries around jurisdictions. When it tries to protect rights, it treats them as attributes that belong to individuals or entities. But in an interdependent system, causality is distributed. What this means is that many of the most important problems we face do not fit neatly into the categories that law is designed to handle. They are not discrete events with clear boundaries. They are processes that unfold across systems. And because of that, they tend to slip through the gaps.

Law (under the sovereignty ontology) can respond to individual violations, assign liability in specific cases, and regulate within jurisdictions, but it struggles to engage with systemic degradation, address cumulative harm, or govern processes that exceed those jurisdictions.

So the idea of an ontological error becomes clear. If the basic assumptions about what the world is made of are misaligned with reality, then even well-designed rules will produce inadequate outcomes. You can refine the rules indefinitely, but the mismatch remains.

Instead, a relational ontology starts by treating interdependencies as primary and actors as secondary. Meaning that systems of interdependence become the central unit of analysis. Actors are understood as participants within those systems rather than as independent entities that interact from the outside.

This recalibration changes how problems are framed. Instead of asking who is responsible within a boundary, the question becomes how a system is functioning across its entire network of dependencies. Our attention shifts toward patterns of interaction, and instead of treating rights as static attributes, they are understood as conditions that emerge from the health of the systems that sustain them. The implication is not that individuals or states cease to exist. It is that they are no longer treated as the starting point. They become expressions of deeper relational structures.

With the relational reference frame in place, the limitations of a sovereignty-based legal system become difficult to ignore. Sovereignty is not just incomplete; it is organized around a way of understanding the world that no longer matches the structure of the systems it is trying to govern.

What Law Looks Like Under Interdependence

If you take interdependence seriously, the law stops being a system of commands very quickly. It starts to look more like a set of conditions.

Let’s return to our example from earlier. Clean water exists because a watershed functions in a particular way. Soil retains nutrients. Vegetation stabilizes flows. Microbial systems process contaminants. Human activity either supports or disrupts these processes. The outcome we call “clean water” is inseparable from the network of relationships that produce it.

So the legal question should be refocused. Instead of asking who violated a rule, attention turns toward whether the system that generates clean water is being sustained. The “right” is not something granted and then defended. It emerges as a condition of successful stewardship.

That changes the structure of law at a very basic level. Participation becomes conditional. If you are part of a system, you are already embedded in its dependencies. The responsibilities attached to that participation are not optional. They are what make the benefits of the system possible in the first place.

A Skeptic might offer the following test case: A factory upstream pollutes a watershed. The factory owner drinks bottled water imported from elsewhere. The downstream community loses access to clean water. Under sovereignty, the factory owner faces no immediate consequence. If interdependence is supposed to be self-enforcing, where is the enforcement?

This scenario is powerful because it feels like a counterexample. But it is actually an artefact of the ontology it presumes.

Under a fully realized relational ontology, the bottled water supply chain is not an escape from interdependence. It is itself an interdependent system. That supply chain is drawing on aquifers, infrastructure, labor, energy, and transport networks that are themselves embedded in watersheds, climates, and ecosystems. The pollution that degrades the local watershed does not remain local. It propagates outward. The same hydrological cycles that move water downstream also move contaminants into groundwater, into soil, and into the atmospheric systems that transport moisture across regions.

The factory owner only gets to drink bottled water because sovereignty ontology creates legal shields that sever these connections. Property law protects the factory’s right to pollute by pricing the externality of pollution. Contract law enforces the bottled water supply chain as if it were independent. Tort law makes it difficult for the downstream community to assert a claim across jurisdictional boundaries.

So let’s think through what happens when we remove those shields. Under interdependence, the pollution that degrades the watershed also degrades the conditions that make the bottled water supply chain possible. The factory owner and the downstream community are not on opposite sides of a legal boundary. They are participants in the same system. The factory owner’s ability to access clean water now depends on the health of the very system they are degrading. While the interdependency-based system does not remove the immediate incentive to pollute (profit), it does clarify the costs associated with that pollution, and thus reduces the chances that the factory owner will pollute.

Does this mean no one can ever externalize harm? No. Transitional periods will contain such cases. But the question is what the legal ontology does with them. Under sovereignty, externalization is the default. Under interdependence, the factory owner has to do the extra work of establishing new legal shields, jurisdictional arbitrage, and carving out exceptions. The burden shifts to the one seeking to do harm, and will only be made more difficult by the community they are trying to harm, who will be actively opposing the work they must then do.

For the specific case where an actor manages to harm a system while avoiding its consequences, metamorphic justice (which we will discuss in a short while) provides the response. The harm is not ignored. It becomes data about where the system’s dependencies have been misrecognized or where legal shields remain. The response is not punishment of the actor but reconfiguration of the conditions that made the externalization possible.

We do not get clean water unless the watershed is cared for. We do not get stable energy unless the energy system is maintained within its limits. We do not get food unless the ecological and logistical systems that produce it are functioning.

In that sense, law becomes less about granting entitlements and more about organizing the ongoing work required to sustain shared conditions, which has a few immediate consequences.

First, enforcement. There is no need to rely primarily on external coercion when outcomes are directly tied to system behavior. If a community neglects the systems it depends on, the consequences show up in degraded conditions. This is not punishment in the traditional sense. It is the system reflecting the quality of its own maintenance. That does not mean there are no interventions. It means interventions are oriented toward restoring function rather than imposing penalties.

Second, measurement. In a sovereignty-based system, measurement often serves regulatory compliance. It is used to determine whether rules have been followed. In a relational system, measurement is part of understanding how the system is behaving. It is closer to observation than surveillance. We measure water quality because we need to know whether the watershed is healthy. We track energy flows because we need to understand whether the system is operating within its limits. The information is gathered to guide stewardship.

Third, governance. There is no single point from which the system can be managed. Different parts of the system require attention at different scales. What emerges are overlapping layers of coordination. Communities, regions, and networks all participate in maintaining the systems they depend on. The role of governance is not to impose order from above, but to facilitate alignment across these layers.

So having a deeper understanding of commons governance is highly relevant. Ostrom’s work shows that shared resources can be managed through collective arrangements that are tailored to specific contexts. These arrangements often rely on local knowledge, mutual monitoring, and adaptive rules rather than centralized authority. A relational legal system generalizes this insight by treating law as something that arises from the need to coordinate stewardship across interdependent systems. It is not static, and it evolves as conditions change and as understanding deepens.

There is a subtle but important change here. We can no longer view Law as being a structure that stands apart from the world. We must, necessarily, view it as a pattern within it. It is embedded in the same systems it is trying to sustain. And because of that, it cannot be reduced to a set of fixed rules. It is closer to an ongoing process of maintaining balance, adjusting to change, and responding to feedback.

The challenge, of course, is that dynamic systems are harder to work with than fixed ones. They require continuous attention, coordination across differences, and they do not offer the same kind of clarity that comes from drawing a line and enforcing it. But they also align more closely with how the world actually functions. And that alignment matters, because a legal system that cannot see the system it is embedded in will always struggle to sustain it.

Structural Challenges of Relational Law

Problems will not disappear if we transition to a relational ontology of law. They will, however, change shape dramatically.

Interdependence clarifies how systems actually function by bringing their tensions into focus. One of the first things that becomes visible is how often responsibilities collide in quiet, persistent ways. A system can be well understood, carefully monitored, and still produce situations where different forms of stewardship pull in different directions.

Think about a forest that supports multiple layers of life and use. It regulates water cycles, stores carbon, sustains biodiversity, and also provides material for construction and fuel. A community living within that forest may approach it with care, aware of its limits, committed to maintaining its long-term viability. Even so, choices have to be made. Harvesting timber at a certain rate may support housing needs but alter habitat conditions. Reducing harvest preserves biodiversity but transfers pressure onto other material systems. Introducing new species to restore one function may disrupt another. None of these actions sits cleanly on one side of a boundary between good and bad stewardship. They are tradeoffs within a living system.

A sovereignty-based framework tends to handle this by assigning authority somewhere and letting that authority decide. A relational framework does not have that shortcut. It has to work through the tension directly, without collapsing it into a single point of control.

Which logically leads to a second challenge. Understanding interdependence does not guarantee alignment. People can see the same system and still prioritize different aspects of it. Short-term pressures do not disappear simply because long-term consequences are visible. A community might fully understand that overuse of a resource will degrade it over time and still feel compelled to act in ways that secure immediate survival. This is not a failure of awareness. It is a feature of living within constraints. In my previous Substack post, I began discussing “How to Coordinate” without relying on alignment as a starting point. The difficulty, then, is not getting people to recognize interdependence. It is finding ways to coordinate action when incentives diverge, timing matters, and the burden of adjustment falls unevenly.

There is also a subtler issue that emerges once we begin mapping systems more precisely. Any attempt to represent interdependence, whether through graphs, flow models, or ecological indicators, involves choices. Choices about what gets included, what gets left out, how relationships are weighted, and how feedback is interpreted. These choices shape how the system is understood, and therefore how decisions are made. Two communities can look at the same watershed and produce different maps of its dependencies. One might emphasize hydrological flows. Another might focus on cultural and historical relationships to the land. Both are valid, yet neither captures the whole. The need to make choices introduces a layer of interpretation that cannot be eliminated. Measurement helps, but it does not settle everything. It provides signals that we can use to inform our decisions, but those signals will never provide final answers.

Then there is the question of scale. Interdependent systems operate across multiple levels at once. A local ecosystem connects to regional climate patterns, which connect to planetary processes. Actions taken at one level ripple outward in ways that are not always predictable. A relational legal framework has to navigate this without defaulting to a single scale of decision-making. Deciding on too much localization means that broader system effects are missed. Conversely, if we scale globally with too much centralization, local knowledge and variation are suppressed. Finding the balance is not (and should not be) a one-time design problem. It is an ongoing process.

Finally, there is the issue of stability and change. Humans are very fond of relative stasis, but not every disruption is a problem. Ecosystems evolve, and disturbances within our systems can be regenerative. A forest fire, under certain conditions, clears undergrowth and supports new growth. Variation is part of how systems maintain resilience. At the same time, some disturbances push systems past thresholds from which they struggle to recover. A relational legal system needs to be able to distinguish between these cases without freezing systems into static configurations. It needs to allow for transformation while still recognizing when a system is degrading in ways that undermine its viability. This is not straightforward. There is no universal rule that separates acceptable change from harmful disruption. It depends on context, on timing, on the structure of the system itself.

All of these point toward a simple conclusion. Interdependence gives a more accurate picture of how the world works, but it does not provide an easy blueprint for governance. It removes certain simplifications and replaces them with a different kind of complexity.

The question is not whether that complexity can be eliminated. It cannot. The question is how to work with it without collapsing back into the kind of centralized authority that the relational approach is trying to move beyond. This is where the need for new concepts of justice and governance starts to come into focus. Not as abstract ideals, but as practical ways of navigating the tensions that interdependence reveals.

Metamorphic Justice: Rethinking Harm and Repair

The realization that law can be viewed as something embedded within living systems rather than imposed upon isolated actors leads us to change the way harm is understood. Subsequently, the entire structure of what we call justice will be peeled away from its familiar forms. The conventional legal imagination tends to approach harm through mechanisms that either punish or restore. When a violation occurs, responsibility is assigned, and some combination of sanction or compensation is applied in order to re-establish equilibrium. Even where systems attempt to move beyond punishment toward restorative models, the underlying logic tends to remain embedded in the idea that harm can be addressed by correcting the behavior of identifiable actors.

But once harm is situated within systems of interdependence, it becomes much harder to treat it like something that originates cleanly at a single point. What appears as an isolated act is often the visible expression of deeper patterns that have been building over time, shaped by incentives, constraints, cultural norms, and material conditions that extend far beyond the individual moment in which harm becomes visible. Returning to the example of a polluted river, for instance, it would be extremely difficult to attribute the pollution to a single decision. The reality is that the pollution reflects an accumulation of practices, expectations, economic pressures, and regulatory blind spots that together made the pollution possible. In that sense, harm can be treated as a signal rather than an attribute of some bounded entity. It becomes something that indicates that the system itself has drifted into a configuration that produces damaging outcomes.

I have written about this before, in essays specifically about Metamorphic Justice. The core principle is that if we only punish, or restore the system to its previous configuration, the most likely outcome is recurrence of harm. So, instead of asking how to respond to harm after it has occurred, the focus repositions to understanding how the conditions that produced that harm came into being, and how those conditions might be transformed so that similar harms do not continue to emerge. This forward-facing approach moves emphasis away from retribution, rehabilitation, or restoration and toward transformation. And while this may sound abstract, it actually provides a very practical orientation that is concerned with how systems can be reconfigured in ways that alter their trajectories over time.

By including a broader category of causes for an event that resulted in harm, we expand the field of responsibility without dissolving it into abstraction. Responsibility is no longer confined to the individual actor who can be directly linked to an outcome, but neither does it disappear into the vague notion that “the system” is to blame. Instead, it becomes distributed across the network of relationships that made the outcome possible, with attention directed toward the specific roles those relationships play. Some actors may carry more influence within that network, others may be constrained in ways that limit their capacity to act differently. Some may even occupy positions that allow them to alter the system more substantially. The task of justice, in this context, becomes one of identifying where intervention can produce meaningful change, rather than simply identifying who can be held accountable in a narrow sense.

This also changes how repair is understood. If harm reflects a systemic imbalance, then repair cannot be limited to compensating for loss or imposing penalties. It requires engaging with the structures that allowed the imbalance to emerge and working to reshape them. This could involve altering material practices, redistributing responsibilities, redesigning incentives, or creating new forms of coordination that did not previously exist. The process is inherently ongoing because systems continue to evolve, and the conditions that produce harm can reappear in new forms if they are not continually engaged with.

There is also something important that happens at the level of time. Conventional justice systems tend to operate retrospectively, looking backward to determine what occurred and how it should be addressed. Metamorphic justice, by contrast, has a forward orientation. It treats the present as a point of intervention within a longer trajectory, where the aim is not simply to resolve what has already happened, but to influence what is likely to happen next. This does not mean that past harms are ignored. It means they are engaged with as part of a process that is oriented toward transformation rather than closure.

None of this removes the need for difficult decisions. There will still be situations where actions must be constrained, where behaviors must be interrupted, and where immediate harm must be prevented. But even in those moments, the focus remains on how the system can be guided toward a different configuration, rather than on how to enforce compliance with a fixed set of rules.

Within a relational legal framework, a transformational approach is a necessity. If law is concerned with maintaining the viability of interdependent systems, then justice must operate at the level of those systems as well. It must be capable of responding to signals of imbalance, tracing them through the networks that produce them, and engaging in the ongoing work of transformation that allows those systems to continue supporting life.

Which raises an unavoidable question. The question you have been asking yourself since you started reading this section. If metamorphic justice is oriented toward systemic transformation rather than punishment, what stops a bad actor from simply defecting? What prevents someone from extracting benefit while refusing to participate in the work of stewardship?

The answer is that under a consistent relational ontology, the conditions that enable defection cease to exist in their current form.

Consider the factory owner we used as an example earlier. This scenario is not an exception to interdependence. It is an artefact of sovereignty ontology. The bottled water supply chain (its extraction, bottling, transport, and sale) is itself an interdependent system. Under sovereignty, legal protections shield the factory owner from the consequences of pollution while allowing the bottled water system to function as if it were independent. Under interdependence, those protections dissolve. The pollution affects the watershed that the bottled water supply chain depends upon. The labor, infrastructure, and ecological systems that deliver that bottle become, themselves, compromised. There is no outside to pollute from.

This does not mean enforcement disappears. It means enforcement becomes immanent. The consequences are not imposed by a separate authority. They flow from the structure of participation. A community that neglects the systems it depends on loses the benefits those systems provide. An actor that harms the watershed cannot, under a consistently relational framework, access clean water from elsewhere, because elsewhere is not elsewhere. It is the same web of dependencies.

Again, we will refer to Ostrom. Her research demonstrated that even in well-functioning commons, some explicit sanctioning mechanisms were necessary. The difference is that under interdependence, those mechanisms are not external impositions. They emerge from the same relational logic. A downstream community that loses water because of upstream pollution is not asking a court to intervene. It is recognizing that the polluter has severed the relational conditions under which the community participates in the shared system. Responses such as withholding cooperation, redirecting resources, or excluding the polluter from coordinated activities are not punishments in the sovereign sense. They are the system reconfiguring around a broken relationship.

I do not pretend this solves all enforcement problems. Transitional periods, in particular, will contain actors who benefit from sovereignty’s protections while exploiting interdependence’s vulnerabilities. My claim is only that a fully realized relational ontology makes defection more costly and less sustainable than sovereignty does, because under sovereignty, defection is often the rational strategy.

Biocentric Governance

There is a lot more that needs to be contemplated for Metamorphic Justice, but once justice gets treated transformatively, governance cannot remain untouched. The two are too tightly coupled. If harm is no longer understood as an isolated violation but as a signal of systemic imbalance, then governance can no longer be organized primarily around issuing rules and enforcing compliance. It has to take on a different role, one that is closer to maintaining the conditions under which living systems remain viable over time. Governance effectively becomes a process of stewardship.

The Living Covenant

I have previously written about biocentric governance. I discussed my reasoning as a response to the limits of human-centered decision-making in a world where human systems are inseparable from ecological ones. I asked whether the systems that sustain life are being maintained within their limits, and treated that question as foundational rather than secondary.

In a sovereignty-based framework, governance begins with anthropocentric claims, by asking what individuals or states want, what are they entitled to, and how can those entitlements be protected or balanced against one another. Environmental considerations are often brought in later, as factors to be weighed, regulated, or mitigated. Under a biocentric approach, the ordering changes. The viability of ecological systems becomes the condition within which all other decisions are made, and human activity is situated inside those systems rather than positioned alongside them.

This does not require a romanticization of nature or a rejection of human development. It requires a recognition that development unfolds within constraints that are not negotiable in the way political preferences are. A watershed can only absorb a certain level of disturbance before its ability to regenerate is compromised. A climate system can only absorb a certain concentration of greenhouse gases before feedback loops begin to transform it into a different state. These are not regulatory thresholds in the usual sense. They are characteristics of the systems themselves, described in work on planetary boundaries and Earth system processes.

Biocentric governance takes these characteristics seriously and treats them as the outer frame within which coordination occurs. That frame is not imposed by an authority. It is discovered through observation, measurement, and ongoing engagement with the systems in question. It evolves as understanding deepens, but it cannot be overridden by preference without consequence.

Within this reference frame, governance becomes an exercise in alignment. Decisions are made by asking how different forms of activity interact with the systems they depend on, and whether those interactions sustain or degrade the conditions required for those systems to continue functioning. This leads to a slightly different way of looking at the scale of governance, because political borders rarely align with ecological ones. So governance begins to orient around bioregions, watersheds, and ecosystems rather than administrative jurisdictions.

This does not eliminate the need for coordination across larger scales. In fact, it often intensifies it, because bioregional systems are themselves interconnected. What changes is the starting point. Instead of beginning from a centralized authority that attempts to manage everything within its reach, governance emerges through overlapping layers of stewardship, each grounded in the specific systems it is responsible for maintaining.

These layers cannot be isolated from one another. They must communicate, negotiate, and adapt in response to shared conditions. If we take seriously that these layers are not merely internally interconnected, but that the layers themselves are interconnected, then the work of governance becomes that of maintaining coherence across these interactions, rather than asserting control over them.

There is a practical dimension to this that will become clearer over time. When governance aligns with the systems that actually produce the conditions of life, it generates feedback that is easier to interpret. Which means that degradation and recovery become visible in the system itself. So, as the distance between decisions and consequences shortens, it becomes easier to adjust course before problems compound into cascading failures and collapses.

Stewardship-oriented governance will by no means be simple. It will remove certain abstractions, but it will replace them with the need for continuous attention and adaptation. It will require that we embrace forms of knowledge that are situated and evolving, rather than fixed and universal. And participation will inevitably be ongoing, because the systems being stewarded are not static.

There is also a cultural shift embedded in this. If governance is understood as stewardship of living systems, then participation in governance is no longer limited to formal political roles. It extends into the practices through which people interact with the systems that sustain them. Farming, building, energy use, waste management, and countless other activities become part of the governance fabric because they shape the systems that governance is concerned with. Under a system of interdependence, recycling would no longer be a largely symbolic act, but a key indication of participation in the stewardship of the commons we are all embedded in.

Governance, when viewed biocentrically, is no longer primarily about maintaining order between competing sovereign claims. Instead, it is about maintaining the conditions under which those claims can exist at all, because it is oriented toward continuity rather than control. And in that sense, it forms a natural counterpart to metamorphic justice. The latter attends to how systems change in response to harm. While the former attends to how systems are guided in ways that sustain their capacity to support life over time.

In discussions with some friends and family on this part of the essay, I was constantly being accused of doing pie-in-the-sky work, generating an idealized system. So before we continue, I want to address this tension directly. Interdependence, as described so far, might seem to assume symmetry. A watershed affects everyone within it equally. A supply chain binds all participants in mutual dependence. But this is not how real systems work.

Power asymmetries are real. A multinational corporation and a smallholder farmer are not equally positioned within a food system. A wealthy enclave upstream and a poor community downstream do not have the same capacity to shape outcomes. Without an account of asymmetry, a relational ontology risks legitimizing the very domination it seeks to overcome, treating all nodes as equivalent when they are not.

My argument is not that interdependence eliminates asymmetry. It is that asymmetry is a product of the modes of coordination that humans use. When coordination favors domination (centralized authority, hierarchical control, extractive relationships), asymmetries are amplified. When coordination favors horizontality (mutual accountability, distributed decision-making, reciprocal stewardship), asymmetries are dampened.

Asymmetries are not eliminable. Some actors will always have more knowledge, more capacity, or a more strategic position within a network. The question is whether the legal ontology amplifies or contains these asymmetries.

Sovereignty-based law systematically amplifies them. By treating actors as formally equal units while ignoring their structurally unequal positions, it allows existing power to reproduce itself. A corporation and an individual are equally “persons” before the law, but their capacity to shape legal outcomes bears no resemblance.

A relational ontology, grounded in interdependence, can do the opposite. By making the health of the system the primary concern, it creates conditions under which asymmetries become visible and subject to adjustment. A node that controls critical infrastructure can be granted more responsibility, instead of less accountability. A community that is disproportionately vulnerable to degradation can be given greater access to decisions affecting that vulnerability. The goal is not to eliminate asymmetry but to alter its impact. By which I mean it must ensure that no single node can degrade the system without consequences, and that those who carry the burden of systemic maintenance are those who also benefit from its stability.

What I’m proposing is not a solution to power in the abstract. It is an orientation toward transparency, distributed capability, and modes of coordination that make domination harder to sustain.

Priority Decisions in Interdependent Systems

At some point, the abstractions we have discussed so far have to give way to choice.

It is one thing to say that systems are interdependent, that governance should be oriented toward their viability, and that justice should transform the conditions that produce harm. It is another thing entirely to decide what to do when those systems pull in different directions, when maintaining one function begins to place strain on another, or when changing conditions force adaptation that cannot be distributed evenly. These moments are where any framework is tested.

In a sovereignty-based system, this friction is often resolved by locating authority and allowing it to decide. The decision may be contested, it may be negotiated, but there is usually a mechanism that allows one outcome to be selected and enforced. Within a relational framework, that mechanism is no longer available in the same form, and the question must reorient to how decisions can be guided without collapsing back into centralized control.

If systems are understood as networks of dependency, then some processes carry more weight than others, because more of the system relies on them. Certain flows support multiple layers of activity. Certain relationships act as bridges between otherwise separate clusters. Some processes stabilize entire regions of the system, while others operate more locally.

When these structures are closely observed, patterns begin to emerge. A wetland that regulates water flow, supports biodiversity, filters contaminants, and sustains downstream ecosystems occupies a different position within the network than a localized infrastructure that depends on that wetland but does not support the same breadth of functions. Similarly, a soil system that underpins food production, carbon storage, and water retention connects to a wider set of dependencies than a single crop cycle that sits within it.

Graph-based approaches (Graph Theory) offer a way to make this visible as a living map of how dependencies are organized. Measures such as connectivity, flow centrality, and bridging roles can help identify where disruption would cascade most widely through the system, and where maintaining stability would preserve the greatest range of functions. This allows the system to inform us about how difficult decisions can be approached. Instead of asking which actor has the strongest claim, our attention turns toward which parts of the system are most critical to its overall viability. Instead of framing the problem as a conflict between interests, it becomes a question of how the system can absorb change while maintaining its core functions.

In practice, this might mean that when tradeoffs arise, priority is given to the processes whose disruption would propagate most widely, or whose stability underpins multiple other systems. It might mean that certain functions are treated as foundational, not because they are politically privileged, but because the system itself depends on them.

At the same time, there is a need to remain attentive to what these models cannot capture on their own.

Dependency mapping can reveal structural importance, but it does not fully account for cultural meaning, historical relationships, or forms of value that do not translate easily into network metrics. A place might carry significance that extends beyond its functional role in a system. A species may be irreplaceable in ways that are not reflected in its number of connections. A practice may hold social importance that cannot be reduced to its position in a flow diagram.

So the use of graph-based reasoning has to remain grounded within a broader field of interpretation. It acts as a guide rather than a determinant, helping to surface patterns that might otherwise remain obscured, while leaving space for contextual knowledge and ethical judgment to shape how those patterns are engaged with.

Time is also an important factor here. Systems are not static, and neither are their dependency structures. What appears central at one moment may become less so as conditions change, and new forms of interdependence emerge. Priority, in this sense, is not something that can be fixed once and applied indefinitely. It has to be revisited as part of an ongoing process of observation and adjustment. This brings the discussion back to the idea of law as something that operates within the system rather than above it. Priority does not come from authority. It comes from understanding how the system is organized, how it is changing, and where intervention can sustain its capacity to support life across its different layers.

That changes how difficulty is approached. The decisions we make to resolve friction are about maintaining coherence in a system that is always in motion.

Transition: From Sovereignty to Interdependence

Now we come to the part where the whole thing either has a chance to become real or remains an interesting line of thought.

I have attempted to describe a different ontology for law. But to go further, we have to imagine how anything like this could take shape within a system that is already so deeply embedded, so slow to move, and so structurally invested in maintaining itself. Legal systems do not change because they are persuaded. They change when the conditions they are built to manage begin to exceed their capacity to function. That is already happening, although it is rarely framed in those terms.

Environmental law is increasingly stretched by problems that do not respect jurisdictional boundaries. Financial regulation struggles to keep pace with networked risk. Infrastructure systems are becoming more fragile under pressures that extend across regions and scales. And the response, more often than not, is to layer additional rules onto existing structures, which can delay breakdown but does not resolve the underlying mismatch.

If we realistically want a relational framework to take hold, it is unlikely to do so by replacing sovereignty directly. Systems of Power Over are deeply reliant on the shields provided by the sovereignty ontology. So the more plausible path is that interdependence begins to emerge alongside sovereignty in places where the limitations of the existing system are already most visible. Those places tend to share the common feature of interdependence that is materially unavoidable.

Water systems are an obvious example. Which is why I have used them so frequently in this essay. A watershed’s functioning depends on coordinated activity across the entire system. In many parts of the world, forms of governance already exist that operate at this level, bringing together different communities to manage shared resources in ways that do not map neatly onto sovereign authority.

Food systems offer another entry point. The growing interest in regenerative agriculture, localized production, and soil restoration reflects a recognition that food cannot be treated as a purely industrial output without destabilizing the ecological systems that support it. Here again, coordination begins to form around systems rather than around isolated actors.

Energy systems are undergoing similar changes, particularly where decentralized generation and storage are becoming more viable. As these systems develop, they create new forms of interdependence that require coordination beyond traditional centralized models.

What is common across these domains is that they create opportunities for what might be called parallel legal structures, although they do not always present themselves this way. They take the form of agreements, protocols, and shared practices that organize how people interact with the systems they depend on. Through these kinds of infrastructure, we can define responsibilities, establish expectations, and create feedback mechanisms, all without necessarily being framed as law in the conventional sense. Over time, these structures will accumulate and form a layer of coordination that operates according to a different logic than that offered by sovereignty. So that participation becomes tied to stewardship, access to shared benefits depends on maintaining the conditions that produce them, and measurement is used to guide action rather than to enforce compliance from a distance.

At first, this infrastructure will coexist with existing legal systems. It may even rely on them for recognition, protection, or resolving specific disputes. But it will also develop its own coherence and ways of organizing relationships that do not depend on sovereign authority.

If it proves effective, something interesting is likely to emerge. As interdependence law becomes more prevalent, the load carried by sovereignty law is reduced, and a snowball effect means that more problems that would otherwise require intervention by authority are addressed within these relational structures. Coordination will become more localized where appropriate and more distributed across networks where necessary. At escalating speed, the need for centralized enforcement diminishes in certain areas because the systems themselves begin to regulate behavior through the conditions they create.

We should not assume that this will be a clean transition, though. It will be uneven, partial, and often contested. There will be points of friction where the two logics collide. Existing institutions will very likely resist or attempt to absorb these emerging structures. And there is a very real chance that relational approaches will get co-opted and reshaped to fit within the old ontology. There is also the possibility that they fail in certain contexts, especially where conditions for relational coordination are weak or where pressures are too intense.

None of this can be avoided entirely. What matters is whether the relational layer can demonstrate a different way of organizing life that is not only conceptually coherent but practically viable. If it can, it will exert pressure on the existing system, not through argument, but through performance. It will show that certain problems can be addressed more effectively when approached through interdependence rather than through sovereignty.

Transition as Three Pillars

Three mechanisms will drive this transition, operating in parallel and reinforcing one another.

First, ecological and systemic collapse. Climate change, biodiversity loss, supply chain fragility, and financial contagion are the sovereignty ontology failing at scale. As these failures intensify, the costs of maintaining the old framework become impossible to ignore. This is a deeply chaotic and harmful process, and when existing institutions cannot (and blatantly refuse to) solve a problem, people begin building alternatives.

Second, deliberate experimentation at bioregional and commons scales. As I have shown throughout this essay, Ostrom’s work demonstrates that communities can govern shared resources without sovereign authority. These experiments already exist in the form of watershed councils, community land trusts, cooperative energy systems, and regenerative agriculture networks. Each is a prototype of relational law in miniature. They define responsibilities, establish feedback mechanisms, and coordinate action across actors who are not bound by a shared sovereign. The task is not to design these from above but to support their proliferation, document their successes and failures, and build networks of mutual learning between them.

Third, intellectual conversion within legal institutions. This is the slowest pillar but also the most enduring. Judges, lawyers, policymakers, and legal scholars operate within sovereignty ontology not because they have examined it and found it to be true, but because it is the water they swim in. As relational concepts become more visible (through the failures of sovereignty, the success of experiments, and essays like this one), they begin to seep into legal reasoning. When a judge cites a watershed agreement, or a treaty incorporates a bioregional framework, or a regulatory standard reframes itself from compliance to system health, the accumulation over decades will constitute a reconfiguration.

No single pillar on its own will achieve a system of law built on an interdependence ontology. Collapse without experimentation produces chaos. Experimentation without intellectual conversion produces isolated successes that never scale. Intellectual conversion without collapse produces theory without adoption. All three pillars will be needed, and potentially other pillars I have not considered.

The transition will be uneven, contested, and long. Different domains will move at different speeds. Environmental law might reconfigure before criminal law, and local systems will probably transform before national ones. But I don’t think we should consider this a failure. It is a pattern seen in many complex adaptations where pockets of coherence emerge within a larger system, gradually reshaping the whole.

Unresolved Questions and Future Work

This essay has outlined an ontology, not a completed legal system. Many questions remain unanswered, and I do not pretend to have resolved them. They are offered here as invitations. I plan to write further on this subject, and I hope that others find value in this work and take up the challenge to carry it further. So here are some areas that I have deliberately left out of this initial foray into the subject.

Criminal law

If harm is understood as systemic imbalance rather than individual violation, how does criminal law function? A murderer and a victim are interdependent, but the victim is disproportionately harmed. The act of murder does not occur in isolation. It emerges from systemic failures in areas like mental health, community support, or access to resources that themselves provided benefits to others. A metamorphic approach would address those systemic conditions while still attending to the specific harm. But what does this mean for incarceration? For punitive measures? For the distinction between accountability and blame? These are open questions.

Family law

Custody, care, and domestic relationships are thoroughly interdependent. But they also involve unique vulnerabilities and histories of abuse that cannot be reduced to “system health” without losing something essential. How does a relational ontology protect the individual against the system, when it is the system itself that is the source of harm?

Contract law

If breach of contract is understood as a signal of systemic misalignment rather than a broken promise, what happens to reliance interests, to damages, to the expectation that promises will be kept? There is a path here (relational contract theory already exists), but it requires development.

The transition period

The most pressing practical question is how to protect the vulnerable during the transition from sovereignty to interdependence. Those who benefit most from the current system will resist. Those who are most exposed to harm cannot wait for full ontological transformation. What interim institutions are needed? What legal hybrids can function within sovereignty while building toward interdependence?

The role of the state

Does a relational ontology render the state obsolete, transform it, or coexist with it? My essay has leaned toward obsolescence, but I have not actually made that argument yet. So, for now, it is assumed, but not explored or decided.

I am one person. The full body of this work will require several generations of legal scholars, philosophers, ecologists, and communities to flesh out completely. This essay is an opening, not a closing.

Law for a Living World (You can treat this like a TL:DR)

If you follow the thread all the way through, the paradigm shift being proposed here is not a minor adjustment. It is not a policy reform or a refinement of existing doctrine. It is a change in how the law understands the world it is operating within.

Sovereignty made sense within a particular historical and material context. It provided a way to stabilize conflict, to organize authority, and to coordinate activity across defined boundaries. That structure has persisted because it works well for those who have benefited from sovereignty within certain limits, and because the institutions built around it are deeply entrenched.

But the conditions those institutions are trying to govern have changed. We are no longer dealing primarily with systems that can be contained within borders or understood as interactions between isolated units. The dominant processes shaping our world are interdependent, distributed, and dynamic. They operate across scales, they propagate through networks, and they generate outcomes that cannot be traced back to a single point of origin.

Trying to govern these processes through a framework built on separation creates a constant need for correction that relies on more rules, more coercion mechanisms, and more layers of oversight. The system very obviously strains to keep up, and in doing so, it reveals its limits.

What a relational ontology offers is a different starting point. It begins from the recognition that the conditions that sustain life are produced through relationships. From that recognition, a different understanding of law naturally emerges. Rights are no longer treated as abstract entitlements that exist independently of the systems that make them possible. They emerge from the maintenance of those systems. Governance transforms from asserting control to aligning activity with ecological and social realities. Justice becomes an ongoing process of transforming the conditions that produce harm rather than simply responding to its outcomes.

None of this simplifies the world. It does not remove conflict or eliminate the need for difficult decisions. What it does is bring those difficulties into closer alignment with the systems they arise from. It replaces a set of abstractions with a set of relationships that can be observed, engaged with, and, to some extent, shaped.

There is also a repositioning of where the law is located. Instead of standing apart from the world as a structure that governs it, law becomes embedded within the systems it is concerned with. It operates through the practices, agreements, and forms of coordination that sustain those systems over time. It is less about imposing order and more about maintaining the conditions under which order can emerge. This is why the transition cannot be forced. A framework like this cannot be introduced from the top down without contradicting its own premises. It has to develop within the systems it describes, through practices that demonstrate their own viability. It has to show, in concrete terms, that organizing around interdependence produces outcomes that are more stable, more adaptive, and more capable of sustaining life.

If that happens, the re-orientation begins to take on its own momentum. Existing legal structures do not disappear overnight. They adapt, sometimes slowly, sometimes unevenly, in response to pressures they cannot ignore. New forms of coordination gain recognition because they work. Concepts that once sat at the margins move toward the center as they become necessary for navigating the world as it is.

The language of sovereignty may persist, but it begins to sit within a broader understanding that recognizes the primacy of interdependence. Authority becomes less central as a concept because it becomes less useful as a way of organizing complex systems.

At that point, the law begins to resemble something closer to what it has always been trying to do, even if it has not always been able to articulate it clearly. It becomes a way of coordinating relationships so that the systems those relationships form can continue to support life. And in a world where those systems are under increasing strain, that may be the most important function law can serve.