This paper introduces Authority Lifecycle Integrity as the structural discipline of ensuring that authority remains valid, scoped, reconstructable, and enforceable across organisational time and distributed system execution. It connects authority drift, stale approvals, and AI-mediated temporal compression to the need for runtime admissibility validation at the commit boundary.
• How does authority decay across time and system boundaries? • What are the dominant authority drift patterns? • What controls preserve authority coherence without slowing execution to a halt? • How should organisations model authority capacity, scope, and expiry? • How is authority continuity enforced in distributed AI-mediated systems?
Define Authority Lifecycle Integrity as the discipline of keeping authority coherent across time, transformations, delegation, and system boundaries until execution admissibility is resolved at T=0.
• The Desynchronization of Authority • Execution Attribution Collapse • Governance Survivability and the Limits of Institutional Recomputation
Preserving authority coherence before irreversible execution
Authority lifecycle → integrity requirement
Authority Lifecycle Integrity
Preserving authority coherence before irreversible execution
Paper type: Arqua Architecture Paper
Status: Planned
Publication state: Concept Approved
Version/date: Placeholder
Abstract
Authority Lifecycle Integrity addresses the problem that authority can decay as decisions move through organisational time, system boundaries, workflow steps and AI-mediated execution pathways. The paper owns the transformation from authority lifecycle to integrity requirement. It examines how scope, expiry, delegation, evidence, context, revocation and state must remain coherent until a proposed action reaches the point where consequence binds. Within Arqua’s programme, it extends The Desynchronization of Authority and supports Execution Admissibility Architecture by defining what must remain valid before runtime admissibility can be resolved. It matters for AI-mediated institutional systems because stale approvals, inferred authority and compressed decision histories can allow execution to proceed under conditions that no longer justify consequence-bearing action.
Focus
This paper asks: how does institutional authority remain valid, scoped, reconstructable and enforceable from decision formation through to runtime execution?
Transformation
Authority lifecycle
↓
Integrity requirement
How this relates to Arqua
This paper develops a failure-mode bridge between The Sovereign Boundary and Execution Admissibility Architecture. It clarifies what SCIA Runtime must re-resolve at T=0 and why Architecture of Record must identify where authority becomes consequential.
Key concepts
- Authority continuity
- Authority decay
- Scope
- Expiry
- Revocation
- Delegation
- Runtime admissibility
- Evidence state
Read this if
Read this if you work in enterprise architecture, risk, governance, regulation or AI governance and need to understand how authority weakens between approval and execution.
Placeholder note
This paper is currently in development. The placeholder records the architectural position, transformation and relationship to the Arqua architecture programme. Full paper text will be added when the draft is ready for publication.
Related papers
- The Sovereign Boundary
- The Desynchronization of Authority
- SCIA Runtime
- Architecture of Record
- Execution Passports
CTA
Start with one high-consequence decision. Identify where meaning, authority, policy, evidence or execution currently becomes uncontrolled.