Institutions of Reflexive Transformation: Polycentric Constitutional Ecology, Boundary Institutions, and Democratic Legitimacy

Cross-system injuries routinely exceed the competence, jurisdiction, and temporal horizon of any single institution. Yet integrating the institutions needed to govern them creates a symmetrical danger: the mechanisms that coordinate knowledge and action may acquire concentrated epistemic, structural, or political power. This article names that problem the coordination–domination dilemma and develops a middle-range institutional framework for investigating it. The proposed construct, polycentric constitutional ecology, describes differentiated and partially autonomous institutions whose relationships are structured through rights, competencies, obligations, information pathways, coordination, accountability, and review, without assigning epistemic or political sovereignty to one centre. It is a programme-specific integration of established polycentric, legitimacy, boundary-organization, metagovernance, subsidiarity, and experimentalist-governance scholarship, not a claim to have invented constitutional polycentricity. The article makes five integrative contributions. First, a Function–Authority–Legitimacy Architecture asks which institution is warranted to detect, assess, represent, deliberate, authorize, resource, implement, review, learn, or redesign. Second, a Reflexive Institutional Ecology Matrix evaluates functional differentiation, connectivity, interoperability, function–authority fit, coordination, operational capacity, contestability, and reflexivity, with T1's three-axis Power Audit applied recursively. Third, a boundary authority principle distinguishes authority to assess and translate evidence from authority to determine collective ends, while rejecting an impermeable science–politics boundary. Fourth, the article specifies constitutionally bounded experimentalism, joining distributed learning to rights floors, standing, distributional safeguards, monitoring, stopping rules, and remedy. Fifth, it diagnoses the possibility that formal political polycentricity coexists with infrastructural monocentricity through common digital, epistemic, financial, or technical dependencies. A structured, focused comparison probes the framework through the Montreal Protocol, the IPCC–UNFCCC relationship, the EU Water Framework Directive and Common Implementation Strategy, Ostbelgien's permanent Citizens' Dialogue, and Great Barrier Reef governance. The cases do not show that more centres perform better. They indicate that topology, causal-scale fit, power at interfaces, material enablement, and the consequentiality of feedback matter more than centre count. Hierarchy remains appropriate for some emergency, rights-protecting, settlement, taxing, and enforcement functions. The governing institutional grammar is therefore: integrate consequences; differentiate authority. Its reflexive corollary is that institutions coordinating others must remain inside, not above, systems of contestation and correction.