omniharmonicSubsidiarity
Subsidiarity is the principle that decisions should be made at the most local level competent to handle them, with higher levels of organization intervening only when lower levels cannot effectively address an issue on their own. Originating in Catholic social teaching and later adopted in European Union governance, it provides a structural safeguard against both over-centralization and fragmentation.
In practice, subsidiarity acts as a design heuristic for polycentric-governance: rather than defaulting to either top-down control or bottom-up chaos, it asks at each decision point, “Who is closest to this problem and has the capacity to address it?” Water quality in a watershed is best governed by those who live there. Interregional trade agreements require coordination at a larger scale. The principle is dynamic — what counts as “competent” shifts as communities develop capacity.
Subsidiarity is a foundational concept for bioregionalism, which argues that ecological boundaries define the natural units of governance. It also underpins democratic-confederalism, where municipal assemblies retain maximum autonomy while confederating for shared concerns. In the architecture of cosmolocalism, subsidiarity determines what stays “heavy and local” versus what becomes “light and global.” The related concept of recursive-sovereignty extends subsidiarity into a fractal principle — each nested level of organization possesses genuine self-governance within its domain of competence.