What Is Stewardship?
DCI defines stewardship as the disciplined use of power in care of consequence. The term applies whenever a participant has enough authority, access, knowledge, resources, or influence to shape conditions for other people or for a shared system.
This page explains DCI terminology in ordinary language. Canonical formulations remain in the DCI corpus.
Power and consequential reach
Power becomes ethically significant through what it can change. A manager may alter access to work and opportunity. A teacher can shape knowledge and confidence. A caretaker can influence safety and daily capacity. Greater reach expands the field of possible consequence.
DCI uses gradients to describe these asymmetries. Stewardship asks the participant with greater reach to remain answerable for how that reach is used.
What stewardship requires
Stewardship includes proportion, accountability, reality contact, interruptibility, maintenance, succession, and the propagation of agency. A steward should remain reachable by evidence and correction because power can distort perception of its own effects.
Maintenance belongs inside stewardship because authority often includes custody of a process, resource, relationship, institution, or body of knowledge. Succession matters because a structure that depends permanently upon one person can become brittle. Relinquishment matters when the role has ended or continued control would narrow the field for others.
Stewardship and agency
A useful stewardship question is whether an intervention leaves other participants with enough capacity for perception, choice, refusal, correction, recovery, and future participation. DCI treats agency as something power can expand, constrain, or consume. Stewardship therefore concerns the conditions that remain after power acts.
Canonical sources
See Stewardship, Power, and Core Axiom 6.