From European critical infrastructure protection to the resilience of European critical entities: what does it mean?

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ABSTRACT

The article is a public policy analysis of the development of legislation on critical infrastructure in the European Union (EU), covering 27 developed countries. More precisely, it concerns the 2022 CER Directive “on the resilience of critical entities’. This directive replaced the 2008 ECI Directive ‘on the identification and designation of European critical infrastructure and the assessment of the need to improve their protection’. We ask what is at stake in this process of moving from one directive to another. Why has the concept of protection been replaced by the concept of resilience, and why has the concept of critical infrastructure been replaced by the newly invented euro-concept of ‘critical entity’? In the concluding section we discuss the European integration dimension of this new directive; what does this development in the CI domain tell us about the current dynamics of European integration, and how it could be explained?

KEYWORDS:

• Critical infrastructure
• resilience
• European Union policymaking
• creeping integration

Disclosure statement

The Coalition for Disaster Resilient Infrastructure (CDRI) reviewed the anonymised abstract of the article, but had no role in the peer review process nor the final editorial decision.

List of acronyms

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Additional information

Funding

The Article Publishing Charge (APC) for this article is funded by the Coalition for Disaster Resilient Infrastructure (CDRI).

Notes on contributors

Christer Pursiainen

Christer Pursiainen is Professor of Societal Safety and Security at the Department of Technology and Safety, Faculty of Science and Technology, Arctic University of Norway (UiT), in Tromsø, Norway, since 2014. He has defended his PhD in Political Science/International Relations at the University of Helsinki in 1999. Previously Pursiainen has worked in leading management and research positions in such institutions as the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre, JRC, Institute for the Protection and Security of the Citizen (Italy, Ispra); Council of the Baltic Sea States, CBSS (Sweden, Stockholm); Nordregio, Nordic Centre for Spatial Development (Sweden, Stockholm); Russian-European Centre for Economic Policy, RECEP (Russian Federation, Moscow); Aleksanteri Institute - Finnish Centre for Russian and East European Studies at the University of Helsinki; and the Finnish Institute of International Affairs, UPI-FIIA (Finland, Helsinki). His publications consist of about one hundred and thirty scholarly publications on a variety of themes, including societal security, crisis management, critical infrastructure protection and resilience, foreign policy analysis, and regional cooperation and integration.

Eero Kytömaa

Eero Kytömaa works as Ministerial Adviser at the National Security Unit of the Finnish Ministry of the Interior. He has a worked extensively on countering hybrid threats and resilience policy planning in Finland and within the EU and NATO. In the past years, Kytömaa has represented Finland in the European Council negotiations on the Directive on the Resilience of critical entities. In 2016-2019 Mr. Kytömaa worked at NATO HQ Defence Policy and Planning Division, Enablement and Resilience Section, in the position of Resilience Staff Officer (VNC). Among other duties Kytömaa coordinated the work of IRCSG planning group which addressed issues such as operational guidance for priority access, maturity resilience modelling and energy interdependencies. In addition, he contributed to work strands related to the Baltic Sea Region security. Before joining the public sector Mr. Kytömaa worked at the Crisis Management Initiative (CMI), which is founded by Nobel Peace laureate and former President of Finland Martti Ahtisaari. His publications consist of articles on national security, countering hybrid threats and resilience.