The power of administrative procedures: Energy infrastructure permitting across 27 EU member states

Complaints about the duration of administrative procedures are commonplace. Apart from filling the daily news, these complaints raise concerns regarding the problem-solving capacity of the state, economic efficiency, and output legitimacy. One field in which the duration of administrative procedures is of paramount importance is the energy transition. To reach carbon neutrality, infrastructures such as electricity grids, storage facilities or wind turbines need to be expanded, and typically have to go through an administrative permitting procedure before. The EU reacted to this challenge by regulating the permitting procedures for so-called projects of common interest (PCIs), with the aim to speed-up administrative decision-making by the EU member states. In this paper, we investigate the duration of permitting procedures in all EU member states and explore how procedural variation due to differentiated implementation impacts the duration of decision-making. We present a novel theoretical model for the explanation of the duration of administrative decision-making, based on a transaction cost approach, arguing that different procedures come with different bureaucratic loads. These different bureaucratic loads meet different levels of administrative capacity in the member states. We put this approach to a first test using data on PCI permitting durations.