Distributed Infrastructures for the Governance of Environmental Change: Physical, Epistemic and Communicative Structure in Interdependent Earth–Human Systems

Governance of environmental change addresses a field composed of many interdependent infrastructures, energy, water, food production, ecosystems, settlements, health, transport, industry, and the digital systems that instrument them, whose couplings carry consequences across sectoral and jurisdictional boundaries. Existing arrangements govern these infrastructures sector by sector, and existing proposals for improvement concentrate on integration, the assembly of distributed observations into a single coherent picture of the system. This paper argues that integration in that sense is unavailable for a field of this kind, and proposes a different architecture. The method is conceptual and architectural: the paper distinguishes three structures that are ordinarily conflated, the physical structure of dependence among infrastructures, the epistemic structure of who knows what about which dependence, and the communicative structure of who reports to whom, and treats their divergences as governance-relevant quantities in their own right. Three consequences follow. A dependence that is physically present and communicatively absent constitutes a determinate and observable governance failure, which supplies a diagnostic that requires no model of the whole. The assembly of heterogeneous observations into one state estimate presupposes a privileged common representation, which physics supplies to meteorology and which coupled social-ecological fields do not possess, so integration must proceed at a layer that does not require it. And the absent edges of the physical structure, the couplings that exist and are unrecorded, are the governance-critical objects, which inverts the usual emphasis on what is measured. The paper's contribution is to define the three structures, to state their divergences as the primary diagnostic of the architecture, to distinguish the position from interdependency analysis, polycentric governance, and Earth observation integration programmes, and to identify the open questions that estimation of these structures raises. Its role is foundational for a wider programme, and it reports no empirical estimate.