Evidence as Access: Admissibility Governance and Epistemic Capacity as a Factor of Production

This paper develops a theory of admissibility governance: a regulatory architecture in whichparticipation in economically consequential systems depends on continuous documentarysufficiency rather than adjudicated wrongdoing. Under conditions of distributed production, structural opacity, systemic trust dependence, decentralized informational triggers,and credible participation gates, regulators substitute evidentiary production for inspectionbased enforcement. Documentary insufficiency alone becomes sufficient for exclusion. Insuch systems, epistemic capacity—the institutionalized ability to generate and demonstrateverifiable knowledge—operates as a threshold factor of production. The framework specifiesboundary conditions, gate constraints, financial amplification effects, ownership contagiondynamics, political economy forces of irreversibility and scope expansion, and distributiveconsequences. It predicts upstream migration of evidentiary thresholds, anticipatory withdrawal upon credible investigation, scale concentration, conservative over-gating, and resistance to deregulation