Regenerative Cycle Architecture: A General Theory of Temporal Governance in Institutional Systems

Institutions frequently fail not because they lack resources or expertise, but because their capital cycles are structurally bound to short-horizon fragility cycles — financial volatility, political turnover, capability decay, civic fluctuation. These operate on timescales fundamentally misaligned with the long-horizon mission cycles that govern asset lifetimes, scientific capability, climate adaptation and intergenerational public goods. The mismatch produces capability decline across domains regardless of managerial competence or policy intent — and the decline is governed not by the magnitude of demand or the scarcity of resources but by the rate at which short-horizon pressure is converted into irreversible institutional loss. This paper introduces Regenerative Cycle Architecture (RCA), a meta-theory of institutional design resting on three structural operations: cycle decoupling, which renders capital independent of fragility cycles; cycle alignment, which synchronises capital behaviour with mission cycles; and authority alignment, without which the first two are insufficient — institutions holding ring-fenced, mission-aligned capital fail to execute when the authority to commit runs on a cadence of its own. RCA formalises a cycle ontology, a three-layer system architecture, and the structural invariants jointly necessary for regenerative, multi-cycle institutional capability. It shows that persistent failure patterns across climate adaptation, science, infrastructure, health and civic systems share one mechanism, and that Perennial Social Capital is the first realised implementation of RCA at the capital layer. It closes by introducing the cycle constitution: a constitutional category protecting temporal integrity as political constitutions protect power.