Continuity responsibility is NWG’s counter to the most dangerous polycentric failure: diffusion of responsibility, where every institution holds partial jurisdiction, so no one owns the outcome and a person falls through the gaps between health, housing, and legal systems while each is technically correct. The counter is a function that owns the gap — whether the interfaces connect — rather than the person. Its design has to be exact, because a coordinator is the natural place for whole-person authority to reassemble by the back door: its jurisdiction runs over the other institutions’ duty to coordinate, enforceable against them, and never becomes a power to direct the participant. No one owns the person; someone owns the failure. See deciding without a final authority and no one decides the whole person.
Continuity responsibility
The function that owns a coordination failure when no single institution owns the participant. It is responsible for whether the interfaces between bounded jurisdictions actually connect — so that "no one decides the whole person" never becomes "no one is responsible for whether the person falls through the whole system." Its jurisdiction runs over the institutions' duty to coordinate, never over the participant.