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. Two of them are established practice under other names. Cycle decoupling — rendering capital independent of fragility cycles — is what no-year appropriations, multi-year appropriations and revolving funds already do against the problem public finance calls annuality. Cycle alignment — synchronising capital behaviour with mission cycles — is asset--liability matching, and has been applied to a mission rather than a liability schedule since Ghadamian. The third operation is this paper's, and it is the one the other two depend on. Authority alignment: an institution holding ring-fenced, mission-aligned capital still fails to execute when the authority to commit runs on a cadence of its own. Protected money does not decide anything. â–¶ The contribution is therefore not that capital should be decoupled and aligned — both are done — but that doing both is insufficient while the decision cadence is unaligned, and that cadence is a designable object with a statable admissibility condition rather than a menu of remedies chosen by precedent. âš ï¸ And it is stated here as the paper's open contribution rather than its settled one. Decoupling and alignment have formal treatment in this paper and external anchors outside it; authority alignment has an argument and a definition (Λ_A, defined below) and no comparable formal result. A claim promoted because it survived contact with the literature is not thereby the best-supported claim in the paper, and the reader is owed that distinction rather than left to find it. RCA formalises a cycle ontology, a three-layer system architecture, and the structural invariants jointly sufficient for regenerative, multi-cycle institutional capability. It argues that persistent failure patterns across climate adaptation, science, infrastructure, health and civic systems share one mechanism, and that Perennial Social Capital is the first fully specified implementation of RCA at the capital layer. âš ï¸ The cross-domain claim is stated with the condition that makes it refutable. It is not that these domains are alike, nor that this mechanism is the largest cause of failure in any of them. It is the narrower claim that wherever an asset or capability has a renewal period longer than the period of the capital that funds it, decline follows from the mismatch alone — so a counterexample is a domain exhibiting that mismatch and not declining, or a domain declining under this mechanism where the periods in fact match. â–¶ Neither requires agreeing that the five domains have anything else in common, and the maintenance-and-repair literature treats decay across several of them without needing that agreement either. It closes by introducing the cycle constitution: a constitutional category protecting temporal integrity as political constitutions protect power.