The USA, U.K., Australia, and Canada all seem to have similar problems with infrastructure procurement. Railways, electricity generation systems, and other large projects – particularly “linear” projects which cover multiple local government areas and engage a variety of interest groups – take much longer to complete, at significantly higher cost than in economies outside the Anglosphere. Why is this?
A common analysis blames it entirely on NIMBYs and the excessive number of veto points and litigation opportunities in the common law countries. The argument runs that environmental protections have been extended too far, and that property owners have too much ability to block entire developments on relatively trivial grounds. And so the YIMBY movement tends to proliferate examples of egregious bad practices, often with humorous names – the “bat shed”, the ”fish disco,” and so on.
But if it was as simple as this, the problem would most likely have been solved already. The “NIMBY” acronym was coined and the problem noticed back in the 1980s. Since then, although habitat protection and environmental regulations have been introduced, there have also been several attempts to deregulate and speed up the planning process. None of them have worked; planning submissions have steadily increased in size and cost and the consultation process has taken longer and longer.
It is this constant growth that we need to look at. Where does it come from? The answer is that the problem of the Anglosphere’s infrastructure procurement is linked to one of its great sources of economic strength – the vibrant and active legal and professional services sector.
Planning objections do not fall from the sky – they are manufactured objects, the output of an industry. Realizing this can reshape our approach to the problem in a number of ways.
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Although most proposals for planning reform are aimed at reducing opportunities for judicial review, or removing grounds for objections to be made, at present the success rate for proposals is actually very high. In the U.K., for example, proposals for Nationally Significant Infrastructure Projects have a failure rate of less than 5 percent. The cost and slowness of the system is not because it is too easy to block projects; it is because they are absurdly over-engineered to prevent blockers. And thinking about the industry in this way also provides some clues as to why slow and expensive infrastructure seems to be specifically an Anglosphere problem.
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In a quasi-judicial system, outcomes are “all or nothing.” There are few opportunities to cure an application once it has been refused; the entire project has failed, and needs to start again. There is extremely limited ability to communicate with the process and get a sense of which objections are potentially show-stopping and which are trivial, strategic, or malicious, and so every possible objection has to be planned for. Spending millions of dollars on placating a small group of objectors is cheap at the price if it buys insurance for a billion-dollar project. And as the number of small groups proliferates, the billion-dollar project becomes a two-billion dollar project.
Seems like a chicken and egg problem. They overengineer it because they don't want blockers, and the blockers block because they want to take every issue into account (if we ignore the NIMBY-ism...
The cost and slowness of the system is not because it is too easy to block projects; it is because they are absurdly over-engineered to prevent blockers.
Seems like a chicken and egg problem. They overengineer it because they don't want blockers, and the blockers block because they want to take every issue into account (if we ignore the NIMBY-ism for a bit).
I guess the real problem is that, at the end of the day, no one really has an incentive to build per se. Governors won't get paid more if they streamline more building, so why make more meetings to compromise? . As explained in the article, there are planners who also aren't getting paid if something is really built either, because their incentives lie in navigating and finding pitfalls, not in getting their client to their destination. And builders don't get paid more if things get built faster; while a lot of stuff is stalled, there's rarely a lack of projects to take up.
I guess we as people can only control thr first one. Hoisting a driven politician who actually wants to push in change. Finding that can be difficult, though
Very interesting article, though it lacks the examples and/or data I want to really be convinced he's right. It's certainly compelling and gives me reason to think. The immediate counterpoint for...
Very interesting article, though it lacks the examples and/or data I want to really be convinced he's right. It's certainly compelling and gives me reason to think.
The immediate counterpoint for me is: corruption. Yes, China builds buildings way way faster than us and a notable part of that is the government actively working on planning with the developers... But they also are still corrupt and frequently skirt even China's relatively lax building codes. Do we want a surge in towers with failing elevators and no fire escapes? I don't know. I'd need to see the examples or data of ways you can encourage building while maintaining construction.
Singapore in particular would be a great case study, I think. Common Law jurisdiction but much better at building than Western/Anglo sphere nations, I suspect due to the effective dictatorship government. I wonder how they handle planning approvals etc?
From the article:
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Seems like a chicken and egg problem. They overengineer it because they don't want blockers, and the blockers block because they want to take every issue into account (if we ignore the NIMBY-ism for a bit).
I guess the real problem is that, at the end of the day, no one really has an incentive to build per se. Governors won't get paid more if they streamline more building, so why make more meetings to compromise? . As explained in the article, there are planners who also aren't getting paid if something is really built either, because their incentives lie in navigating and finding pitfalls, not in getting their client to their destination. And builders don't get paid more if things get built faster; while a lot of stuff is stalled, there's rarely a lack of projects to take up.
I guess we as people can only control thr first one. Hoisting a driven politician who actually wants to push in change. Finding that can be difficult, though
Very interesting article, though it lacks the examples and/or data I want to really be convinced he's right. It's certainly compelling and gives me reason to think.
The immediate counterpoint for me is: corruption. Yes, China builds buildings way way faster than us and a notable part of that is the government actively working on planning with the developers... But they also are still corrupt and frequently skirt even China's relatively lax building codes. Do we want a surge in towers with failing elevators and no fire escapes? I don't know. I'd need to see the examples or data of ways you can encourage building while maintaining construction.
Singapore in particular would be a great case study, I think. Common Law jurisdiction but much better at building than Western/Anglo sphere nations, I suspect due to the effective dictatorship government. I wonder how they handle planning approvals etc?
The author also wrote good news about snails, covering a situation in the UK where this was avoided.