The Intersector Project
On the heels of last month’s Infrastructure Week, talk of cross-sector collaboration as an approach to designing, building, and operating public infrastructure has heightened—with discussion probing both the benefits and costs. A recent American Review of Public Administration article “Does a partnership need partners? Assessing partnerships for Critical Infrastructure Protection” provides new insight into partnership approaches to managing infrastructure. The article provides a close look at an ongoing Department of Homeland Security (DHS) led collaboration to manage the country’s “Critical Infrastructure and Key Resources” (CIKR)—a term that denotes assets that are essential to the nation’s security, public health and safety, economic vitality, and way of life. “Simply put, it’s power grids and water filtration plants; national monuments and government facilities; telecommunications and transportation systems; chemical facilities and much more,” according to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
The vast majority of the nation’s CIKR is owned and operated by private interests; it’s not surprising, then, that DHS must leverage partnerships to protect these assets. DHS’s “Critical Infrastructure Protection” (CIP) partnership includes non-governmental organizations, private firms, federal agencies, state agencies, and local governments in 18 key industries related to critical infrastructure, ranging from agriculture, energy, and the environment to banking and transportation. Unlike other partnership models “in which goals are defined, partners are manageable in number, and tasks are known,” observes author Chris Koski, “CIP spans a wide range of actors whose tasks are unclear and continually evolving.” Also, DHS has “little ability…to compel action” and “very few additional resources to offer partners.”
This complex partnership structure is hierarchical at the top and network-based and diffuse at the bottom. DHS operates as the lead agency and is responsible for selecting agencies with which to partner, providing program direction and assigning tasks, while the remaining partners work through their respective horizontal and vertical relationships (including state and local governments where relevant) to implement risk and emergency management strategies as directed by DHS.
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