A plan is less a bounded document than a temporary stabilisation inside a much longer chain of selective continuities. Long before a proposal acquires a statutory name, history has already distributed capacities: ownership forms, administrative routines, legal competences, professional vocabularies and technical expectations sediment into a field in which some futures arrive as obvious and others require exceptional labour merely to become visible. Sorensen’s historical institutionalism gives this condition temporal thickness. Path dependence is not a claim that the past mechanically determines the present; it identifies positive feedback through which earlier institutional choices alter the cost and probability of later moves. Lindblom adds a more intimate scale of decision.
