Sealed Recognition in Innovation Governance: Avowability and the Structural Asymmetry of Standard-Reopening

It is widely held that a directed-evaluation state possesses an advantage in the governance of innovation. This paper argues that the claim conflates the production of capability with its recognition, and that once the two are separated the governance question changes shape. Recognition criteria are altered constantly, and everywhere: by insolvency, by expiry, by the departure of those who wrote them, and by the replacement of those in whose practice they consisted. Each of these compels an alteration; none produces a reason. Sealing is therefore the closure of the reason-channel and not of the change-channel, and an evaluative layer may be altered daily and remain perfectly blind. Answerability is demoted accordingly. It is not the engine of correction but the condition of learning — the production of a statement, by a party competent to be heard, of the respect in which an extension failed to count them. Where the affected set is sufficiently closed, institutions can approximate the conjunction of compulsion and avowability; merger control supplies the strongest case examined here. Where the affected set is open they can be conjoined only through representation of the absent, and representation is neither guaranteed nor neutral: no procedure ensures that the interest a criterion excludes will be represented before the criterion forecloses its formation. The party injured by an innovation-recognition criterion’s failure to count a capability is characteristically a firm that does not yet exist. Innovation governance is on this account not the site of an impossibility but of the severest form of a representational asymmetry — the case in which the excluded interest is the one the exclusion prevents from forming. Both jurisdictions examined fix their innovation-recognition extensions by instruments that are sealed on the tests developed here: in each, criteria change without a stateable reason. Whether they differ in the rate at which drifted practice is consolidated intelligibly into declared criteria cannot yet be stated, that rate being defined only where criteria are written down and the two jurisdictions writing down different things. The visible difference lies in production rather than in evaluation. NOTE: Paper 1: Recognising New Capability in Innovation Governance (LXR-GOV-EVALGEN-2026-01, doi:10.5281/zenodo.21095860).Paper 2: Answerable Generativity in Innovation Governance (LXR-LAW-ANSGEN-2026-01, doi:10.5281/zenodo.21257050).This paper (No 3 in research series) materially confines the constructive implications of Paper 2.