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S. Lindbergh and J. Radke
of quantifying criticality of nodes or critical infrastructure assets as a guiding principle for protection policies (Homeland Security 2013). U.S. critical infrastructure
protection plans focus on prioritizing hardening investments on identified hubs as
that would theoretically give a higher return in terms of decreasing the consequences
of failure to the entire system.
An essential characteristic of CI lies in its interconnectedness and interdependence. Although interdependence modeling originated in the field of economy
around the 1950s, gaining strength with Leontief’s Input-Output analysis of national
resources (Leontief 1986; Lin et al. 2016), network science has been applied to
modeling connectivity and capturing the dependencies and interdependencies of
infrastructures from a spatial perspective (Grubesic et al. 2008; Murray et al. 2008;
Lewis 2006; Hasan and Foliente 2015; Lin et al. 2016). CI interdependency describes
a bidirectional relationship between two infrastructures through which the state of
each infrastructure influences or is correlated to the state of the other, i.e., when two
infrastructures depend on each other for the supply of vital services or commodities
(Rinaldi et al. 2001).
Finally, three major ideas derive from the institutional development of CI
presented above (1) CI policy is directly derived from a governmental response
to large scale armed conflict and terrorist attacks; (2) the scale of the “criticality”
concept is tied to a physical attribute of infrastructure at a nation-wide perspective;
and (3) it helped establish the importance of interconnectedness and interdependency,
where there is recognition of network effects derived from local hazards. These three
ideas help explain some of the gaps identified in CI literature and the dominant
top-down securitization hypothesis for the good of national interests. This technocratic approach has been highly criticized as it resulted in policies designed to face
an alleged extra-ordinary dimension of hazards with war-like strategies that remain
disconnected from everyday development policies and practices (Gaillard 2010). Our
understanding of the social construct of risk has been underlining the shortcomings of
this technocratic approach since the first half of the twentieth century with the advent
of the vulnerability paradigm (Burton et al. 1968; Haas and White 1975; Hewitt 1983;
Cardona 2005; Blaikie et al. 1994; Cutter 1996; Wisner et al. 2012; Tierney 2014).
The vulnerability paradigm, raised to counter hazard-centric technological fixes in
disaster risk reduction (DRR), is being integrated into what was narrowly defined as
CI protection, to become CI resilience (George Mason University 2007; Hellström
2007; Hosseini et al. 2016) framed within the socio-ecological and socio-technical
systems’ framework (Alderson 2019; Markolf et al. 2018; Smith and Stirling 2008).
S. Lindbergh and J. Radke
of quantifying criticality of nodes or critical infrastructure assets as a guiding principle for protection policies (Homeland Security 2013). U.S. critical infrastructure
protection plans focus on prioritizing hardening investments on identified hubs as
that would theoretically give a higher return in terms of decreasing the consequences
of failure to the entire system.
An essential characteristic of CI lies in its interconnectedness and interdependence. Although interdependence modeling originated in the field of economy
around the 1950s, gaining strength with Leontief’s Input-Output analysis of national
resources (Leontief 1986; Lin et al. 2016), network science has been applied to
modeling connectivity and capturing the dependencies and interdependencies of
infrastructures from a spatial perspective (Grubesic et al. 2008; Murray et al. 2008;
Lewis 2006; Hasan and Foliente 2015; Lin et al. 2016). CI interdependency describes
a bidirectional relationship between two infrastructures through which the state of
each infrastructure influences or is correlated to the state of the other, i.e., when two
infrastructures depend on each other for the supply of vital services or commodities
(Rinaldi et al. 2001).
Finally, three major ideas derive from the institutional development of CI
presented above (1) CI policy is directly derived from a governmental response
to large scale armed conflict and terrorist attacks; (2) the scale of the “criticality”
concept is tied to a physical attribute of infrastructure at a nation-wide perspective;
and (3) it helped establish the importance of interconnectedness and interdependency,
where there is recognition of network effects derived from local hazards. These three
ideas help explain some of the gaps identified in CI literature and the dominant
top-down securitization hypothesis for the good of national interests. This technocratic approach has been highly criticized as it resulted in policies designed to face
an alleged extra-ordinary dimension of hazards with war-like strategies that remain
disconnected from everyday development policies and practices (Gaillard 2010). Our
understanding of the social construct of risk has been underlining the shortcomings of
this technocratic approach since the first half of the twentieth century with the advent
of the vulnerability paradigm (Burton et al. 1968; Haas and White 1975; Hewitt 1983;
Cardona 2005; Blaikie et al. 1994; Cutter 1996; Wisner et al. 2012; Tierney 2014).
The vulnerability paradigm, raised to counter hazard-centric technological fixes in
disaster risk reduction (DRR), is being integrated into what was narrowly defined as
CI protection, to become CI resilience (George Mason University 2007; Hellström
2007; Hosseini et al. 2016) framed within the socio-ecological and socio-technical
systems’ framework (Alderson 2019; Markolf et al. 2018; Smith and Stirling 2008).