Resolution-Covariant Maneuverability: Landscape Generation in Coupled Multiscale Systems

This working paper develops a resolution-covariant account of maneuverability in coupled multiscale systems. The central claim is that a system's effective admissible region is not given independently but is jointly generated by the system's intrinsic organization and feasibility contributions induced by neighboring levels and environmental conditions. These contributions are represented by viability-transfer operators — set-valued maps that translate the condition and support capacity of coupled levels into feasible subsets of the focal system's state space. Maneuverability is defined as the tangent cone of the resulting effective admissible region. The paper establishes that maneuverability is relational, that support contraction implies maneuverability contraction, and that non-radial constraint geometry can arise from the intersection of simple feasibility contributions even when each contributing level appears scalar in isolation. The construction is resolution-covariant: the same formal relation between effective region, viability transfer, and maneuverability applies at any focal resolution level. The paper connects landscape generation to cascade admissibility and identifies catastrophic cascade failure as the condition under which a single feasibility contribution collapses to empty, annihilating the effective admissible region regardless of the focal system's internal state.