From Pilots to Constellations: Stewardship, Coordination, and Governance Across Living Systems

This preprint examines recurring coordination failures across complex living systems, including animal health and agrifood systems, homelessness and addiction responses, environmental stewardship, and public‑sector governance. Despite strong technical expertise and institutional mandates, these domains often experience fragmented decision‑making, diffuse accountability, and crisis‑driven responses that fail to generate cumulative learning. The paper advances the concept of a stewardship coordination problem, in which responsibility is distributed across actors, species, and institutions without corresponding frameworks to align decision‑making, legitimacy, and accountability under constraint. Drawing on insights from multiple bounded pilot contexts, it introduces a distinction between Active Strategic Domains—where responsibility and action are currently held—and Opportunity Constellations, which represent non‑immediate fields of potential application identified through pattern recognition rather than operational commitment. Rather than prescribing solutions or asserting authority, the paper proposes governance‑aware conditions under which learning can responsibly transfer across domains without overreach. The aim is to provide a shared conceptual frame that supports coordination, legitimacy, and alignment across complex systems, while preserving institutional roles, consent, and proportionality. This preprint is shared for discussion and review.