A number of actions, collectively known as binding, prepare a reference for invocation of its target: locating the target, setting up a connection, checking access rights and concurrency control state, type-checking, instantiating a proxy, etc. Existing languages or operating systems support only a single binding policy, that cannot be tailored to object-specific semantics for the management of distribution, replication, or persistence. We propose a general binding protocol covering the above needs; the protocol is simple (a single RPC and one upcall at each end) but recursive; however the recursion can be terminated at any point, trading off simplicity and performance against completeness. This comprehensive, unified protocol is capable of supporting different languages and object models, and may be tailored to support various policies in a simple manner