Consequence-weighted governance is the model’s alternative to flattening every decision into one procedure — whether that procedure is “let the market decide” or “put everything to a vote.” Instead, the structure scales to the stakes: the greater the consequence of a decision, the broader and more rigorous the jurisdictional structure becomes.
What it looks like
A schoolteacher choosing tomorrow’s lesson needs almost no apparatus. A city siting a park needs wider local participation. A company deploying an AI system that affects millions needs technical, legal, social, and public oversight together. A decision carrying catastrophic biological risk needs much tighter distributed authority still, with no single point that can act alone. Democracy is not abolished by this — it is placed, used where its breadth is the right tool rather than stretched over questions it handles poorly. The idea is the governance sibling of graduated jurisdiction: authority and scrutiny both track consequence. See Who Gets to Decide?.