The Charter of Legitimate Political Economy: Constraint-Based Principles for Systemic Viability

This paper sets out a foundational framework of constraint-based principles for legitimate political economy under conditions of power asymmetry, uncertainty, and ecological and social limits. It defines the structural conditions under which fiscal systems, recognition architectures, and public measurement regimes can remain stable, contestable, and legitimate over time. The principles articulated are normative, systemic, and institutional in character, and operate prior to policy choice rather than as optimisation criteria or behavioural prescriptions. The framework is intended as a durable reference for the design, interpretation, and evaluation of public economic systems in post-growth and growth-constrained contexts, with an explicit focus on preventing predictable failure modes such as enclosure, extraction, legitimacy erosion, metric capture, and institutional capture.