Risk Governance State-of-Affair Across Swedish Interdependent Infrastructures

Society is highly dependent on services such as electricity, communication, and transportation. Furthermore, the critical infrastructures (CIs) that provide these services are highly interdependent through a number of physical, economic and organizational links. In this context, a holistic perspective on risk is essential to avoid suboptimal interventions and risk-related blind spots. Here, fragmented knowledge constitutes a great challenge as it calls for collaboration and information-sharing across CIs. This study explores four governance-related themes in a Swedish context: interdependencies, responsibility, collaboration and information-sharing. The aim of the study is to identify barriers and opportunities for governance of risks across CIs, and to give guidance towards future research. The study focuses on three technical infrastructure sectors: electronic communication, transportation, and energy. To explore these sectors, two complementary studies were carried out: (1) a document analysis, and (2) an interview study. Apart from summarizing the findings from the four studied themes, we have identified five cross-cutting findings that could inform directions of future research. These findings include: (1) silo-structures are present in the studied context, (2) `windows of opportunity' is a dominant driver of the current work, (3) responsibility for resilience tends to be shifted away from the own organization, (4) key individuals, not organizations, are perceived to be seminal for successful cross-sector work, and (5) many different incentives exist and it is unclear how they interplay.