The Changing Nature of Critical Infrastructure Contingency Planning and Crisis Management.

This paper makes three arguments about the changing nature of contingency planning and crisis management geared towards protecting critical infrastructure (water, utilities, telecommunications, etc) in western democracies. First, a shift from primarily within-state, and public responses to contingency planning and crisis management is taking place whereby planning and management are increasingly addressed in public/private cooperation, and increasingly at a regional level, in for example European and North America-spanning fora. Second, the threat of terrorism, addressed in prevailing all-hazards approaches to contingency planning and crisis management, has a dominant status respective other threats (such as major storms), achieving what can be seen as a paradigm-shaping role in these public/private and increasingly regional and even international milieu. Indeed the threat of terrorism is the argument currently forwarded for increasing critical infrastructure protection. Finally and consequently, the shift to public/private, to regional/supranational levels, and the paradigm-shaping status of the threat of terrorism have implications for accountability, openness and transparency, as well as for economy, safety and security - at the local to the supranational level. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]