The past decade has seen an increasing use of complex computer systems made of third party components to develop mission critical applications. To insure the dependability of those systems in a sound and maintainable manner, technologies are needed to add fault-tolerance mechanisms transparently, while maintaining efficiency, high coverage, and evolvability. In this paper, we present a generic framework that addresses this problem and can be used within current industrial software. Our proposal is based on a limited set of core concepts inspired from plant biology and meta-object protocols. It provides separation of concerns for the implementation of adaptive fault tolerance strategies, while maintaining a global inter-level perception of the system runtime behavior. We demonstrate its practicality by using it to control the non-determinism of a CORBA/UNIX system.