Reference Abstract
Boin, A. and McConnell, A. (2007).
Preparing for Critical Infrastructure Breakdowns: The Limits of Crisis
Management and the Need for Resilience.
Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management, 15: 50–59.
Modern societies are widely considered to harbour an increased propensity for breakdowns of their critical infrastructure (CI) systems. While such breakdowns have proven rather rare, Hurricane Katrina has demonstrated the catastrophic consequences of such breakdowns. This article explores how public authorities can effectively prepare to cope with these rare events. Drawing from the literature on crisis and disaster management, we examine the strengths and weaknesses of traditional
approaches to crisis preparation and crisis response. We argue that the established ways of organising for critical decision-making will not suffice in the case of a catastrophic breakdown. In the immediate aftermath of such a breakdown, an effective response will depend on the adaptive behaviour of citizens, front-line workers and middle managers. In this article, we formulate a set of strategies that enhance societal resilience and identify the strong barriers to their implementation.
De Bruijne, M. and Van Eeten, M. (2007), Systems that Should Have Failed: Critical Infrastructure Protection in an
Institutionally Fragmented Environment.
Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management, 15: 18–29.
Recent years have witnessed major governmental initiatives regarding critical infrastructure protection (CIP). During that same time, critical infrastructures (CIs) have undergone massive institutional restructuring under the headings of privatization, deregulation and liberalization. Little research has gone into understanding the interactions between these two developments. In this article, we outline the consequences of institutional restructuring for the changing ways in which CIs ensure the reliability and security of their networks and services. Neither Normal Accident Theory nor High-Reliability Theory can account for reliability under these conditions.
We then investigate the implications of these findings for CIP.
Belluck, D.A., Hull, R.N., Benjamin, S.L., Alcorn, J. and Linkov, I. (2006).
Environmental Security and
Environmental Management: The Role of Risk Assessment. NATO Security through Science Series, 1-16.
Population growth, needed economic growth, and social pressures for improved infrastructure coupled to the need for human health and ecological protection and environmental security make systematic and transparent environmental decision making a complex and often difficult task. Evaluating complex technical data and developing feasible risk management options requires procedural flexibility that may not be part of existing evaluative structures. Experience has demonstrated that direct transposition of risk assessment and risk management frameworks (e.g. those developed in the United States and European Union) may not work in regions whose social, legal, historical, political and economic situations are not suitable or prepared for acceptance
of these methodologies. Flexible decision-making, including the use and development of acceptable or unacceptable risk levels based on the critical nature of an infrastructure type, is one potential approach to assist risk managers in their decision-making. Unfortunately, the newness of the discussions on the interrelatedness of environmental security and critical infrastructure has yet to produce a unified and comprehensive treatment of the fields.
As a result, this paper will describe and define these terms in order to set the stage for discussions of human health and ecological risk assessment and risk management later in the paper. This paper reviews basic concepts defined in the field of risk assessment and extends its applicability to the areas of environmental security and critical infrastructure protection.
Sousek, R., Dvorak, Z (n.d). Risk identification in critical transport
infrastructure in case of central Europe with focus on transport of dangerous shipments.
The article describes experiences of authors with risk identification in critical transport infrastructure in the Czech Republic and Slovakia.
Bennett, D., Jahankhani, H., Dastbaz, M., Jahankhani, H.(2011). A Secure Hybrid Network Solution to Enhance the Resilience of the UK Government National Critical Infrastructure TETRA Deployment. International Journal of Information Security and Privacy, 5(1), 1-13.
In developed economies, electronic communication infrastructures are crucial for daily public, private, and business interactions. Cellular systems are extensively used for business communications, private interaction, and in some cases, public information services, via such uses as mass SMS messaging. The Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) is at the core of all communications platforms. It was used primarily for voice communication purposes, but with current technological advances, this platform has been transformed from a voice to voice interface to a web enabled multimedia platform that provides commercial, business, and e-commerce services to the public. In response to the September 11, 2001, terrorist acts in New York City, the UK government introduced a policy of separating and transferring all emergency communication traffic
from the PSTN to a digital public safety network based on the TETRA architecture.
This paper extends the utilisation of the TETRA deployment by discussing a secure MANET hybrid solution for use in extreme situations as a short/mid-term EMS organisational communication platform for emergency and rescue operations.
Pursiainena, C. (2009). The Challenges for European Critical Infrastructure
Protection. Journal of European Integration, Volume 31, Issue 6,pages 721-739.
Critical Infrastructure Protection has become a new field of European integration. This article identifies some of the challenges on this road towards a more shared approach. It argues that while the very concept of critical infrastructure is in flux, the whole approach is challenged by the more general approach that concentrates on resilience of societal functions instead of mere protection of infrastructures. The article also claims that it is not completely clear against what kind of threats the critical infrastructures should be protected and by whom. The article further points out the limits of the regulatory efforts of the governments or the EU in trying to protect infrastructures that are mostly owned and operated by private actors.
Whalley, R. (2010). Chapter Five: Critical Infrastructure Adelphi Series. Special Issue: Europe and Global Security.
Volume 50, Issue 414-415, pages 103-122
In the twenty-first century, the European Union is confronted by myriad security problems that demand concerted action and cooperation. As a negotiating power, it seeks to persuade Iran to forswear a nuclear weapons programme. As a crisis manager it seeks to contribute to global peace and stability through civilian and military operations. Closer to home, it is wrestling with questions about membership enlargement, large-scale migration and terrorist threats to the security of its populations and infrastructure. European governments, already under financial strain from ageing workforces and welfare systems, face ever more difficult choices about budget cuts in security and defence after the near-collapse of the global banking system. Will it be possible to enhance cooperation between member states? How can the EU complete its transition from a security actor with great potential to a player that credibly aligns available policy instruments and resources?
These and other issues about the very
nature and identity of the Union are explored in this Adelphi. From the need to establish its hard-power credentials, overcome its reluctance to demonstrate them against non-compliant states, and leverage its relationships with other great powers, to attempts to break its dependence on Russian energy, it is clear the EU has its work cut out. But, by affirming its commitment to multilateralism and defining a careful balance between closer cooperation and the national security concerns of EU member states, this book suggests, the European Union can build on its status as a global security power in the making.
van der Vleuten, E ; Lagendijk, V (2010).
Interpreting
transnational infrastructure vulnerability:
European blackout and the historical dynamics of transnational electricity governance. Energy policy, 2010 APR, Vol.38(4), p.2053-2062.
Recent transnational blackouts exposed two radically opposed interpretations of Europe’s electricity infrastructure, which inform recent and on-going negotiations on transnational electricity governance. To EU policy makers such blackouts revealed the fragility of Europe’s power grids and the need of a more centralized form of governance, thus legitimizing recent EU interventions. Yet to power sector spokespersons, these events confirmed the reliability of transnational power grids and the traditional decentralized governance model: the disturbances were quickly contained and repaired. This paper inquires the historic legacies at work in these conflicting interpretations and associated transnational governance preferences. It traces the power sector’s interpretation to its building of a secure transnational power grid from the 1950s through the era of neoliberalization. Next it places the EU interpretation and associated policy measures against the historical record of EU attempts at transnational infrastructure governance. Uncovering the historical roots and embedding of both interpretations, we conclude that their divergence is of a surprisingly recent date and relates to the current era of security thinking. Finally we recommend transnational, interpretative, and historical analysis to the field of critical infrastructure studies.
Aradau, C. (2010). Security That Critical infrastructure protection is
Matters: Critical Infrastructure and Objects of Protection. Security dialogue, 2010 OCT, Vol.41(5), p.491-514 .
prominently concerned with objects that appear indispensable for the functioning of social and political life. However, the analysis of material objects in discussions of critical infrastructure protection has remained largely within the remit of managerial responses, which see matter as simply passive, a blank slate. In security studies, critical approaches have focused on social and cultural values, forms of life, technologies of risk or structures of neoliberal globalization. This article engages with the role of ‘things’ or of materiality for theories of securitization. Drawing on the materialist feminism of Karen Barad, it shows how critical infrastructure in Europe neither is an empty receptacle of discourse nor has
‘essential’ characteristics; rather, it emerges out of material-discursive practices.
Understanding the securitization of critical infrastructure protection as a process of materialization allows for a reconceptualization of how security matters and its effects.
Egan, M. J. (2007), Anticipating Future Vulnerability: Defining Characteristics of Increasingly Critical Infrastructure-like Systems. Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management, 15: 4–17.
The world's ‘Critical Infrastructure’ (CI) has increased in size during the three decades between 1975–2006. CIs are those systems that provide critical support services to a country, geographic area for a corporate entity; when they fail, there is potentially a large cost in human life, the environment or economic markets. This article examines the characteristics of new technologies or services that are becoming a part of the CI, but are not yet. The article attempts to systematically define the characteristics of
‘criticality’ in order to better anticipate the types of vulnerabilities these new technologies or services create.
D. Procházková: Ground works for critical infrastructure protection. In Czech. In:
Krizový management. RVO VA Brno 2004, ISBN 80-85960-71-0, 313-321.
The paper concentrates the attention to the vulnerabilities of energy and of water supplies, mainly their infrastructures to different disasters and their impacts including questions connected with the countermeasures linked with infrastructure organisations (centralized and decentralized).
D. Procházková: Real problems of critical The paper describes the specific properties
infrastructure threatening the region safety. In: Reliability, Risk and Safety – Ale, Papazoglou & Zio (eds) © 2010 Taylor
& Francis Group, London, ISBN 978-0-415-60427-7, 2387-2394.
of the Critical Infrastructure (CI). By help of analyses of selected cases of CI failures and by theoretical analysis of behaviour of the System of Systems (SoS) partial systems and the whole CI with the What, If method and with the All Hazard Approach use there are determined for 6 important disasters in the Czech Republic both, the direct impacts on partial infrastructures and the impacts at which the failure of one infrastructure was transferred by cascade form to another infrastructures. With regard to these data there are identified on the technical and operating / managerial levels the corresponding sources of risks. Because the CI is complex SoS, the responsibilities for critical infrastructure safety in a region have all stakeholders. On the data set used there are specified problems in 5 professional domains and in each of them there are determined critical items. From the comprehensible reasons the special attention is devoted to the public protection.
D. Procházková: Safety Management of Critical Infrastructure. In: Critical
Infrastructure Safety and Security (CrlSS-Dessert´11). ISBN 978-966-662-226-9.
The critical infrastructure is a set of mutually interconnected networks, i.e. the systems of various sectors of human system. An interconnection of systems means the mutual dependence. Therefore, in linkage with the safe critical infrastructure and with sustainable development potential there is necessary to solve several problems, namely safety of partial infrastructures and safety of a set of mutually dependent infrastructures.
With regard to a present knowledge we know that the optimum safety of the set of infrastructures there is not the set of optimum safeties of partial infrastructures, and therefore, we must search for solution by other way. The work indicates a possible approach for solution acquisition.
Steven M. Rinaldi, James P. Peerenboom, and Terrence K. Kelly, “Identifying,
Understanding and Analyzing Critical Infrastructure Interdependencies,” IEEE Control Systems Magazine 21, no. 6 (December 2011): 11-25.
This is a fundamental source on the analytical foundations of critical infrastructure protection. It reviews accepted definitions.
Then it proposes dimensions for describing infrastructure dependencies and examines in detail each dimension, providing numerous, real-world examples.
Todor Tagarev and Nikolay Pavlov, “Main Tasks and Relationships in the Analysis and the Protection of Critical
Infrastructure”, Military Journal, vol. 113, no. 1 (2006): 84-96. [in Bulgarian].
The authors provide a structured description of goals, objectives, and tasks in approaching the problem of critical infrastructure protection and how they relate to other public policy decisions, thus setting the foundation for a rigorous decision-making process including threat and vulnerabilities assessment, sectoral analysis, assessment of interdependencies and potential cascading effects, developing and comparative analysis of strategies and measures for critical infrastructure protection