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.