Essential to coordinating a distributed application is organizing and traversing the distributed application graph.

Lexical scoping performs this function amongmodern highlevel programming languages, but does not have the same distinction in distributed programming systems, where it competes with various forms of associative and objectoriented binding. We will show that distributed lexical scoping, combined with closures, provides a powerful means of coordinating communication in distributed computations and can significantly reduce the complexity for developing certain types of applications vis-a-vis other coordination paradigms/languages. These results are not dependent on a particular programming language, and can be combined with existing paradigms.