["Journal of Agrarian Change, EarlyView. ", "\nABSTRACT\nDependency has long structured agrarian political economy, explaining how producers are embedded in markets, capital circuits and regulatory regimes. This paper argues that dependency remains indispensable yet analytically incomplete without attention to evaluative authority. I distinguish between authorial discretion—the power to define optimization criteria, thresholds and performance metrics—and responsive discretion—the latitude to manoeuvre within externally defined frameworks. Across cross‐compliance systems, insurance architectures, certification regimes and digital platforms, evaluative criteria are increasingly stabilized upstream and embedded infrastructurally in everyday production. Farmers may retain agency in implementation while lacking control over the logics by which performance is judged. This stratification reorganizes authority within dependent agrarian relations without necessarily altering ownership structures. Drawing on agrarian political economy, infrastructure studies and feminist scholarship on gendered authority, the paper argues that contemporary agrarian transformation can also be understood as a reorganization of authorial discretion.\n"]