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

CRITICAL INFRASTRUCTURE PROTECTION IN THE BALTIC SEA REGION
Baltic counterparts to this type of tense cooperation between the ‘likeminded’.
Thus, there exists the Baltic Council of Ministers (BCM) facilitating the
cooperation between the governments of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, resembling
though not coming even close to the NCM in its level of integration and respective
organisational resources. Its parliamentary counterpart is the Baltic Assembly
(BA).
The BSR countries differ in their level of centralisation or decentralisation,
but especially the Nordic countries and Germany have traditionally had a high
level regional and local autonomy within the nation states. This tradition of
decentralised or rather flexible administrative and political systems compared to
hierarchic or centralised systems has been adopted step by step in the three Baltic
States and Poland, due to their participation in the BSR cooperation but also
through their EU membership. Russia is more centralized and especially
international cooperation of its regions has perhaps become more difficult or
bureaucratic during the past few years compared to the mid-1990s, but there is still
room for regional initiatives and activities, including in cross-border issues. This
general situation of importance of regions and other local actors in the BSR has
led to the establishment of a number of sub-regional cooperation networks
between regions, cities and other non-state actors such as trade unions or business
councils. Thus, there are the Baltic Sea States Subregional Co-operation (BSSSC),
Union of Baltic States (UPC), so-called B-7 cooperation between the Baltic Sea
main islands, Baltic 21 focusing on sustainable development efforts, and many
other forms of cooperation beneath the intergovernmental and multilateral levels.
Depending on the exact organization, these institutions’ multilateral work is
expressed in many forms. They might be prime minister –level summits and
declarations, sectoral minister meetings and decisions, operational Task Forces or
high-level Working Groups in different fields, regular meetings of Director
Generals of different government agencies, joint comments on EU green or blue
papers or other initiatives, conferences and seminars, and more concrete largescale
projects, usually within the framework of the EU-funded programmes such
as the INTERREG.
CIP-relevance of regionalism
Most of the regional institutions, networks and programmes have a clear relevance
to CIP, and there is a clear need for this cooperation. Evaluating their activities
explicitly from the CIP perspective, matching their priority areas, programmes,
working groups, projects and so forth with those CI sectors listed in the EPCIP
(Table 3 above), we find out that there is a lot going on in this field at all levels
and in several institutions simultaneously (Table 11). Just to illustrate, these
include such as the ND Environmental Partnership (NDEP) focusing mainly on
nuclear waste management, the CBSS Working Group on Nuclear and Radiation
Safety, BASREC’s Working Groups in several fields of energy (such as gas),
HELCOM’s projects and programmes on ships’ traffic and navigational safety and
other marine affairs, BSSSC Working Group on maritime safety, and so forth.
A great part of the regional project cooperation within and between the above
mentioned institutions and networks is financed by the INTERREG programme,
and many CIP-related issue areas (energy, transport, maritime safety, urban
structures etc.) are included in these project activities. However, a specific CIP
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