Towards a Baltic Sea Region Strategy in Critical ... - Helsinki.fi

CHAPTER I: INTRODUCTION
well. This in turn may cause a failure in a third infrastructure, and so on.
Thus, the failure cascades through the infrastructures like a wave,
sometimes revealing new interdependencies between seemingly
independent CI. For example, a failure in the natural gas infrastructure
might result in a failure of a power generation unit, causing power
blackouts.
• Escalating Failure: A disruption in one infrastructure worsens an existing
independent disruption in a second infrastructure, mainly by affecting the
time of recovery or restoration. For example, a disruption in a
telecommunications network may be escalated by a simultaneous
disruption in a road transportation network, as repair personnel and
equipment are delayed.
• Common Cause Failure: Two or more infrastructure networks are
disrupted at the same time, of some common cause. For example, during
a storm, trees may crash both phone lines and power lines, causing
disruptions to telecommunications and power distribution.
It is clear, that the ability to identify and analyze interdependencies is an important
part of CIP. If we look at the above typologies from the perspective of the BSR,
we can notice that although these interdependencies are a common feature of CI
systems and often materialize via cyber connections through ICT, most of them are
regionally determined, meaning related to geographic proximity and integrated
regional networks. Thus, the breakdown of an electricity network is likely to affect
first and foremost the interdependent local or regional CI networks, and only after
that have an effect elsewhere. This is particularly true in the BSR and especially in
the Nordic countries, where CI are in many sectors often part of the very same
Nordic infrastructure system.
1.7 THE DILEMMA OF PUBLIC-PRIVATE PARTNERSHIP
Governments are usually legally responsible for safeguarding the CI, although
most of the CI are owned, administered and operated by the private sector. This is
why public-private partnership (PPP) is considered as a major issue in
safeguarding national infrastructure (e.g. Abele –Wigert 2006, pp. 57-58). While in
the United States private industry traditionally owns most of what is defined as
national infrastructure, its share being estimated as 85 per cent, in many European
countries such infrastructures as water, energy, and railway transportation have
previously often solely been taken care of by the governments. However, since
1980s there has been an ongoing process of the market liberalisation and
privatisation of these infrastructures. The rapid development of the predominantly
privately owned and operated ICT, and other sectors’ dependence on it, has further
complicated the situation. This has led to a rather ambiguous situation in terms of
the real authority, as described by de Bruijne and van Eeven:
“[Government authorities] may have, formally or informally, the
overall responsibility for the reliable provision of services, but they
lack the authority and resources to actually fulfil that responsibility.
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