This collaborative research addresses the challenges of fashioning and implementing national critical infrastructure policies. The research addresses the efforts over the past eight years to fashion a coherent critical infrastructure policy, the involvement of different entities in those processes, the interplay with policies addressing other types of infrastructure, and the implications of changes in federal funding and grant programs. The extent to which the various coordination efforts have resulted in meaningful communities of interest, the commitment of relevant partners to undertaking the necessary actions, and the mechanisms that have been most effective in facilitating these are of particular theoretical interest. Advances in understanding these issues contribute to the policy process and public administration literature addressing the challenges of governing complex policy areas in extending scholarship about policy coherence, policy regimes, policy learning, policy coordination, and intergovernmental implementation.
This research provides the basis for theoretically and empirically informed advice about the design of critical infrastructure policies and about the coordination of critical infrastructure programs. The integrative theme is the governance of complex policy areas. Addressing these necessitates actions that span multiple policy sectors, within and across different levels of government, and among private and public entities. A fundamental issue is the unification of these efforts in support of coordinated action. This research has noteworthy implications for not only critical infrastructures but also other complex policy areas such as responses to climate change, the depletion of the oceans, and lapses in food safety. The research engages graduate and undergraduate students with new frontiers in studying critical infrastructure policy and complex policy areas. The involvement of junior faculty facilitates future research on these topics.
This collaborative research addresses the challenges of designing and implementing solutions to complex policy problems with a specific focus on efforts to address threats to the nation’s critical infrastructures. The research led to innovative ways of thinking about policymaking for and implementation of solutions for addressing complex problems. In theorizing about and demonstrating the potential for applying regime perspectives for such problems, the research has provided important contributions to new developments in theories about policy processes. The regime perspective provides an expanded notion of policy implementation that revitalizes the study of this topic. The research also adds new insights to risk policymaking in providing new perspectives about widely dispersed risks that are not easily comprehended or addressed by individual actions. Examples of these include the loss of biological diversity, declining ocean health, threats to cybersecurity and other critical infrastructures, and potential catastrophic effects of earthquakes, volcanoes, tsunamis, and other low-probability natural events. The federal government’s planning-partnership approach to protecting the nation’s critical infrastructures is instructive for efforts that seek to stimulate protective actions by private entities for public risks. The findings show varied development of critical infrastructure protection partnerships that underscore differences in starting points in fostering such communities, in the ability to mobilize and focus attention within them, and in the likelihood of sustaining efforts to address threats to critical infrastructures. Given these differences, a single blueprint for mobilizing attention and engaging communities of interest is too blunt. The broader impacts of this research relate to the training of scholars and future professionals in public policy and civil engineering, and to the implications of the research in considering private-sector roles for addressing risks for which it is hard to create and sustain protective actions. The research shows that devising strategies for addressing public risks requires rethinking both public and private sector roles. A central ingredient for strengthening the contribution of the private sector’s role for protecting society from harms involves activating the shared sense of responsibility among private actors for devising strategies of broader relevance to their industry. The findings show that industry associations are key players in all of this. Yet, these findings show it is not easy to mobilize or engage disinterested interests around issues that are perceived to be of little immediate consequence.
