Distributed ecological accounting answers the most dangerous question in the whole scheme: who measures? If one global institution declared that a given state exports too much ecological cost, the state would reject the finding and the world would be back inside strategic competition, now with a distrusted master scorekeeper. And a single authoritative figure — an “Ecological Transfer Index” that rates a country 72.4 and a firm 43.8 and is treated as fact — would be the gatekeeper the framework exists to prevent: a number handed the power to decide who counts.
So the design refuses a central accountant on purpose. Many independent institutions estimate the same flows under different assumptions — governments, universities, NGOs, international bodies, and AI models — and their disagreement is kept visible rather than resolved into one official number. This is the direct application of the rule that no metric receives ontological authority: ecological accounting is evidence for deliberation, never sovereignty over it, and several models that disagree are not a defect but the thing that keeps the instrument correctable.