A framework organized around technical design invites an immediate and legitimate objection: that governance by expertise is technocracy, and technocracy is incompatible with democratic legitimacy. The paper opens on that objection directly, engaging Dahl, and answers it with a jurisdictional principle. Expertise holds authority over systems and never over persons.
From that principle the paper specifies a governance architecture: polycentric councils organized by domain rather than by territory, a public register of disagreements, adversarial review as standing procedure, protected minority reports, and outcome-based review cycles that place expert authority under continuous conditional renewal. The argument is that expertise constrained by jurisdiction, exposed to adversarial challenge, and subject to outcome review is a different institution from the one the technocracy critique targets.