Capacity-Forming Functions, Participatory Capacity, and the Four Modes of Support
A definitions note clarifying the terms that now anchor the revised framework.
Capacity-Forming Function
Capacity-forming functions are activities that people, groups, or systems must continue to perform in order to retain the ability to act, judge, adapt, and remain responsible. The point is not only what gets done, but what happens to the system when that function is repeatedly carried elsewhere.
Participatory Capacity
Participatory capacity is the system’s living ability to take part in carrying its own capacity-forming functions. It names not isolated self-sufficiency, but the capacity to remain an active bearer rather than a passive beneficiary of the relations through which stability is maintained.
Support Relation
A support relation is the arrangement through which a capacity-forming function is carried, stabilized, trained, distributed, or replaced. The framework asks what that relation does to participation over time.
The Four Modes of Support
Constitutive Co-Regulation
External relation is part of the system’s healthy operation. Participation is preserved or deepened because the relation belongs to the competence itself.
Developmental Scaffolding
Support temporarily helps carry a function in a way ordered toward stronger future participation by the learner or system.
Stable Distributed Competence
The function is genuinely shared across a durable arrangement of agents, tools, and environments without hollowing out the system’s role in carrying it.
Substitutive Dependence
Function is preserved, but the system increasingly ceases to participate in carrying it. Output may remain stable while capacity decays.
Compressed Diagnostic
Capacity decays when function is preserved without participation.