Abstract. Modern distributed computing demands unprecedented levels of dynamicity and reconfiguration. Mobile computing, peer-to-peer networks, computational grids, multiagent systems, are examples of domains exhibiting a continuously changing system configuration. In these settings, the context where computation occurs is not only dynamically changing, but also affecting the components’ behavior in a fundamental way, by enabling or inhibiting some of their actions. In this paper we are concerned with formal specification. Process calculi are a common choice for specifying concurrent and distributed systems. Unfortunately, context representation is rarely addressed explicitly. A few approaches provide limited expressiveness, in that they force the specifier to exploit a predefined and partial notion of context. This paper is a first step in laying the formal foundation for a process calculi specification style that: i) fosters a coordination approach by sharply separating the...