Lislevand and colleagues treat planning duration as an empirical institutional variable rather than an anecdotal complaint about bureaucracy. Commissioned by the Norwegian Ministry of Local Government and Regional Development, the report combines statistical analysis with ten case studies in five municipalities, interviews with developers and municipal actors, and legal and organisational interpretation. Its iconic move is to disaggregate “delay” into characteristics of the planning case, the process itself and municipal organisation, thereby refusing the simplistic assumption that long processing time has a single cause. The report’s theoretical importance lies in making temporality part of planning capacity: efficiency depends on coordination, knowledge, sequencing, clarity of roles and the timing of objections and infrastructure requirements. Methodologically, it joins aggregate administrative data with process reconstruction, allowing statistical patterns to be read alongside institutional mechanisms. Its wider bridge is to governance studies and organisational sociology, where time is understood as a product of institutional coupling, procedural uncertainty and distributed decision authority.
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