Grievance Without Decay: A Temporal Theory of Institutional Legitimacy and Its Governance

Modern institutions embed moral and grievance-based claims into durable governance structures intended to correct historical injustice or systemic harm. Such mechanisms are often initially corrective, yet many persist without renewal long after their empirical conditions, beneficiaries or mission relevance have changed. This paper advances a structural explanation: contemporary institutions lack temporal governance mechanisms for moral legitimacy. Drawing on Regenerative Cycle Architecture and Alignment Capital, we formalise grievance not as a moral claim but as an institutional input — one that must decay, revalidate and realign across time to remain legitimacy-preserving. The failure has a single formal statement: drift occurs when grievance-derived authority decays more slowly than the conditions that justified it. The quantity it governs is the extractive wedge between the authority an institution exercises and the legitimacy currently supporting it. Classification proceeds on the direction of both series rather than their difference — which separates drift from escalation and, more consequentially, from under-correction, that a difference rule reports as institutional health. From this we derive six governance mechanisms — decay, revalidation, symmetry, exit, protected feedback and divergence tracking — each with a diagnostic that detects its absence and a safeguard that supplies it. Grievance escalation destabilises institutions through a rate condition independent of the moral validity of the grievance, and that asymmetry determines which remedies are available: institutions can raise their capacity to renew legitimacy, but cannot lower the rate at which grievance is expressed without abandoning the corrective purpose. The framework is domain-general, preventive, and deliberately bounded: it cannot declare grievances resolved, revoke recognition of historical injustice, or justify rollback of protections. It governs only the renewal, scope and alignment of authority derived from grievance. âš ï¸ It does not comprise, and has never contained, a stage-timeline of institutional decline — classification is a claim about sign, not about position on a path.