Institutional closure in development governance: The repositioning of local voice

Large-scale industrial projects linked to the green transition can proceed through accelerated and procedurally insulated authorization while formal opportunities for participation or contestation remain available. This article develops the concept of institutional closure to denote configurations in which competence allocation, authorization design, and procedural sequencing leave locally accessible intervention weakly aligned with the arenas and stages at which consequential development choices remain open. Using a structured qualitative comparison of six battery-related projects across five Hungarian municipalities, the analysis reconstructs authorization arrangements and traces local voice across political, participatory, administrative, and legal arenas. The comparison identifies patterned but non-deterministic variation among three predominant trajectories: juridified voice, in which legal and administrative arenas gain relative importance; procedural exhaustion, in which repeated engagement loses timely leverage over core authorization; and managed engagement, in which involvement remains concentrated on implementation or mitigation. Across the cases, local voice persisted without following a uniform trajectory or retaining uniform effectiveness. The findings illuminate a recurrent tension between speed and coordination on the one hand and deliberation and contestability on the other in green transition-linked industrial development. The framework provides a basis for examining other fast-track or procedurally insulated development settings.