Infrastructure permitting is widely recognised as one of the most pressing challenges in infrastructure delivery. Across OECD countries, it is difficult to identify a major project without examples of extended procedures, legal disputes, stakeholder conflicts, redesigns, cost escalation, or in extreme cases, cancellation. Available evidence suggests that these pressures have intensified over recent decades.
Part of this increase reflects the legitimate expansion of what can be described as the “permitting envelope” — the body of environmental protections, participation rights and procedural safeguards developed over decades. Many of these frameworks emerged in response to earlier planning practices of the 1950s and 1960s that paid insufficient attention to environmental and community impacts. Over time, countries refined their legal and procedural systems to increase transparency, accountability and predictability in decision-making.
However, an upcoming OECD study finds that the interaction between formal compliance requirements and real-world implementation often produces unintended effects. While legal frameworks are rule-based and compliance-driven, the final stages of permitting frequently unfold through informal, project-specific bargaining under conditions of uncertainty. This dynamic can create hold-up risks, repeated redesign, and incentives that raise pre-construction costs without necessarily improving environmental or social outcomes.
Many countries have pursued important streamlining measures — including statutory time limits, one-stop shops, digital case management systems, accelerated regimes and the use of Imperative Reasons of Overriding Public Interest (IROPI). These reforms enhance transparency and predictability and remain necessary. Yet evidence suggests they do not fully resolve the underlying incentive structures that drive delay and cost escalation in complex projects.
The report will therefore explores whether, alongside continued streamlining, countries may benefit from more structured and transparent approaches to managing conflicts in the final stages of permitting. It also considers the role of comparative data and benchmarking in helping governments better understand where and why time and costs accumulate.
