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Much can be learned about the scope for changing the trajectory of energy system development by examining the effects of governance re-scaling, and how this is negotiated by prevailing regimes of energy provision. To advance this proposition, this article uses Barry's concept of 'technological zones' to analyse how devolution within the British state, to Wales, has affected the politicisation and organisation of electricity infrastructure decisions. The evidence presented centres on arguments about energy governance and devolution in two government inquiries. While logics of democratic accountability to Wales were asserted, along with arguments for more territorially integrated approaches to energy infrastructure decisions, the more dominant discourse emphasised swift and stable procedures to facilitate major investment and infrastructure delivery. The research shows that while intensifying place-based conflicts and pressures for governance re-scaling potentially disrupt the reproduction of infrastructural systems they do not automatically do so, which should direct our attention to the conditions which shape their politicisation.

Governments in many countries have sought to accelerate the time taken to make decisions on major infrastructure projects, citing problems of 'delay'. Despite this, rarely has the time variable been given careful empirical or conceptual attention in decision-making generally, or in infrastructure decision-making specifically. This paper addresses this deficit by analysing decision-making on two categories of major infrastructure in the UK – transport and electricity generation – seeking both to generate better evidence of the changes to decision times in recent decades, and to generate insights from treating time as resource and tracking its (re)allocation. We find that reforms introduced since 2008 have done relatively little to alter overall decision times, but that there are marked and revealing changes to the allocation of time between decision-making stages. While public planning processes have their time frames tightly regulated, aspects led by developers (e.g. pre-application discussion) are not; arranging finance can have a bigger effect on project time frames, and central government retains much flexibility to manage the flow of time. Speed-up reforms are also sectorally uneven in their reach. This indicates how arguments for time discipline falter in the face of infrastructure projects that remain profoundly politicised.

Proponents of ecosystem services approaches to assessment claim that it will ensure the environment is 'properly valued' in decision making. Analysts seeking to understand the likelihood of this could usefully reexamine previous attempts to deploy novel assessment processes in land-use planning and how they affect decisions. This paper draws insights from a meta-analysis of three case studies: environmental capital, ecological footprinting, and green infrastructure. Concepts from science and technology studies are used to interpret how credibility for each new assessment process was assembled, and the ways by which the status of knowledge produced becomes negotiable or prescriptive. The influence of these processes on planning decisions is shown to be uneven, and depends on a combination of institutional setting and problem framing, not simply knowledge content. The analysis shows how actively cultivating wide stakeholder buy-in to new assessment approaches may secure wider support, but not necessarily translate into major influence on decisions.