A boundary-based framework for analysing cross-sector cooperation in societal security – Svalbard case studies

In times of converging and diversifying audiovisual (AV) industries, digitising health sector and the increasing phenomenon of cross-sectoral innovation, the question arises about the state of affairs between the health and AV sectors. The chapter aims to explore what the main modes of cross-sectoral cooperation between the health and AV sectors are and what supports and hinders the emergence of a related cross-innovation system. The chapter introduces two case studies carried out in Estonia and the wider Aarhus region (Midtjylland) in Denmark. At each site representatives of the main stakeholders of both sectors were interviewed – policy makers, entrepreneurs, educators and professionals. The results demonstrate the crucial role of path-dependencies – in terms of both hindering and enabling cross-sectoral dialogues – and also the importance of effective coordination in supporting cross-innovation.

Interorganizational (IO) cooperation has been examined primarily as a role-based concept. This research seeks to extend this concept by examining a distinct mode of IO cooperation: favor-based coop...

The protection of Critical Information Infrastructures (CIIs) is usually framed in the larger context of protecting all the Critical Infrastructures (CIs) that a Nation or a group of Nations (as is the case of the European Union) consider as essential for the maintenance of vital societal functions, health, safety, security, economic or social well-being of citizens.

In order to ensure energy, economic and societal security, the State must ensure access to electricity to all domestic, industrial and vital consumers, which are made through critical power infrastructures. This makes power substations strategic objectives of national and European interest, and the role of OHS (personnel and secure workplaces in an ergonomic and healthy working environment) on them becomes a major objective to ensure the smooth functioning of the national economy. In the current situation, and in many unfortunate cases, OHS activity is subordinate to production or service activity and OHS risk assessments and audits are also made formally by non-specialized personnel, leading to undesirable events with an unstable effect, and the need for assessment (auditing) with legal and other provisions is intended to verify compliance with OHS rules and principles and to limit or stop work accidents. This paper addresses the verification of OHS, by “INCDPM Bucharest method” - Assessment of conformity with legal and other provisions (auditing)” - to an European critical infrastructure (power substation), for the purpose of verifying knowledge and conformity with legal and other provisions at the workplace level and assessing the efficiency or failure of the OHS management system of the analyzed economic entity management, and after implementation it will serve as a tool to verify the functioning of the system. The assessment (auditing) of the OHS shows that the critical power infrastructure under consideration has an overall level of safety close to maximum (99,88%) and a low overall risk level, which means that OHS rules are met and the assessment (auditing) has had a positive effect.

This analysis focuses on the Biden administration’s role in advancing cross-regional security cooperation. It first explores the strategic imperatives that have driven greater cooperation between the Euro-Atlantic and Indo-Pacific theatres, emphasising the geopolitical shifts that have necessitated more networked approaches among US allies and partners. The analysis then evaluates how the Biden administration undertook policy entrepreneurship, not only revitalising existing alliances but also institutionalising new modes of cooperation. Initiatives such as NATO’s Indo-Pacific Four (IP4) and AUKUS illustrate Washington’s efforts to bridge traditional regional security architectures and create linkages between allied states. However, the durability of some of these mechanisms remains uncertain. With the return of the Trump administration marked by a more transactional and unilateralist foreign policy, the future of US-led cross-regional partnerships is in question. The final section assesses the legacy of Biden’s approach and the prospects for continued Euro-Atlantic – Indo-Pacific security cooperation in an era of radical shifts in US foreign policy.

The purpose of the conformity assessment is a direct one, namely checking the degree of knowledge and conformity with legal and other provisions at workplace or organization level and an indirect one of assessing the effectiveness of the OHS management system at work. To ensure energy, economic, and societal security, the government must ensure that all home, industrial, and crucial customers have access to electricity, which is provided through critical power facilities. As a result, power substations become important national and European objectives, and the role of OHS (human resources and secure workplaces in an ergonomic and healthy working environment) on them becomes a vital goal for ensuring the smooth operation of the national economy. In the current situation, and in many unfortunate cases, OHS activity is subordinated to production or service activity, and OHS risk assessments and audits are also formally conducted by non-specialized personnel, resulting in undesirable events with an unstable effect, and the need for assessment (auditing) in accordance with legal and other provisions is intended to verify compliance with OHS rules and principles and to limit or prevent work accidents. This paper addresses the verification of OHS, by "INCDPM Bucharest method" - Assessment of conformity with legal and other provisions (auditing)" - to an European critical infrastructure (power substation), for the purpose of verifying knowledge and conformity with legal and other provisions at the workplace level and assessing the efficiency or failure of the OHS management system of the analyzed economic entity management, and after implementation it will serve as a tool to verify the functioning of the system. The assessment (audit) performed is part of the initial analysis prior to the development and implementation of an OHS management system with the goal of assisting management decisions, and it is also used after implementation as a tool to verify the management system's operation in order to determine the decisions required to ensure the system's continuous improvement.    

This research note reviews recent literature on the vulnerability of critical infrastructures caused by climate change with a focus on the Nordic countries. We integrate literature from three research areas: the role of critical infrastructures in the functioning of society, infrastructural vulnerabilities, and the long-term impacts of climate change. Focusing on climate change adaptation in the Nordic countries as a pivotal case, we discuss the mutually constitutive interrelationships between these three areas. The studies reviewed bring together social science and humanities research on infrastructure systems, their vulnerabilities, and climate change. By highlighting interdisciplinary perspectives on infrastructures, climate change, and societal security, this research note discusses a Nordic model of infrastructure provision and links the Nordic debate to a burgeoning European discussion on the role of the social sciences and humanities in addressing societal challenges related to climate change and the role of infrastructures in providing welfare.

The concept of human security, today widely used by a wide range of governments, international organizations, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs), is the latest in a long series of attempts to broaden traditional conceptions of security. These include such ideas as global security, societal security, common security, comprehensive security, and cooperative security. Aside from being the most recent attempt to redefine the concept of security, the human security approach is significant for two reasons. First, unlike most other previous reformulations, it stands in tension with, or even opposition to, a state-centric conception of security. Second, policymakers have adopted the discourse of human security, and have used it to generate important and interesting foreign and security policy initiatives and to influence specific kinds of programmes and practices, especially in the context of post-conflict peacebuilding.

Introduction to <i>Climate Change Adaptation in New York City: Building a Risk Management Response</i>

The chapter gives an account and analysis of the development of the theoretical use of the concept of “security”, from a rather narrow, state-centric and militarised one of national security, via one focusing on national and other identities, i.e. societal security, to a much wider concept, including concerns for human rights, development, gender issues, etc., labelled human security. This theoretical analysis is followed by an illustration of how the different forms of security are interlinked, i.e. how national, societal and human security problems relate to each other in the Middle East, particularly in the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.

&amp;lt;p&amp;gt;Critical infrastructure is a complex system that provide essential services to the society such as food, water, energy, transportation, health, financial services. Any potential dysfunction of Critical Infrastructure might result in severe consequences for the human life, the environment, the economy and the security of the country. The recently experienced repercussions of COVID-19 pandemic exposed major deficiencies in terms of protection of Critical Infrastructure. The implemented approaches focusing on the threat identification and prevention strategies, without efficient organisational resilience, proved to be ineffective, especially in case of unanticipated or low-probability threats. The biological threats, such as pandemics, are relatively rare and difficult to estimate and prevent. They affect the whole organisation and contrary to the most of the natural hazards, such as floods, fires or hurricanes, have constant, permanent character. The COVID-19 pandemic forced Critical Infrastructure operators to operate in crisis mode as a result of shortages of staff, disruption of supply chains and increased vulnerability to cyber-attacks. The occurrence of these consequences unveiled the underlying vulnerabilities of Critical infrastructure. Namely, the lack of capabilities to successfully detect the possible threats resulting from dependencies and interdependencies and vulnerabilities related to internal procedures, plans or capabilities to respond and recover after the adverse event. The protection of Critical Infrastructure based on identification and assessment of vulnerabilities would enable Critical Infrastructure operators to apply adequate measures tailored to address the causes of identified vulnerabilities, to prioritise actions and to concentrate resources on the most pressing issues. The understanding of vulnerability of Critical Infrastructure to biological threats, would help Critical Infrastructure operators to prepare better for future &amp;amp;#8220;black swan&amp;amp;#8221; events and cascading disruptions across sectoral boundaries. The elimination or reduction of vulnerabilities would make Critical Infrastructure more resilient to future crisis situations and would ensure the undisturbed continuity of the essential services.&amp;lt;/p&amp;gt;

In future mobile networks, the device-to-device (D2D) communication is considered as an efficient technique emerging direct and high-speed data transmission among devices (e.g. mobile social network services and machine type communications). Due to spectrum reuse among devices, the D2D however also brings in more interference, which will cause degradation in network performances. Therefore the concept of cooperative D2D communication is recently proposed to this issue and efficient radio resource allocations are further required. In this context, this paper focused on the bandwidth and power allocation problem for cooperative D2D communication and proposed a dynamic allocation scheme according to the channel status information (CSI) and data rate requirement. The goal is to minimize the total transmission power consumption in a cooperative D2D network with M transmitting devices(TDs) under respective data rate constraints of N receiving devices(RDs). Based on the KKT (Karush-Kuhn-Tucker) conditions of this problem, the dynamic allocation scheme is designed both for the cooperative diversity and multiplex modes. This scheme gives closed-form solutions for bandwidth and power allocation in cooperative diversity mode, and reduces the computational complexity of allocation in cooperative multiplex mode.

Social (central) planning is normally used in the literature to optimize the system-wide efficiency and utility of multi-operator systems. Central planning tries to maximize system's benefits by coordinating the operators' strategies and reduce the externalities, assuming that all parties are willing to cooperate. This assumption implies that operators are willing to base their decisions based on group rationality rather than individual rationality, even if increased group benefits results in reduced benefits for some agents. This assumption limits the applicability of social planner's solutions, as perfect cooperation among agents is often infeasible in real world. Recognizing the fact that decisions are normally based on individual rationality in human systems, cooperative game theory methods are normally employed to address the major limitation of social planner's methods. Game theory methods revise the social planner's solution such that not only group benefits are increased, but also there exists no agent whose cooperative gain is less than his non-cooperative gain. However, in most cases, utility is assumed to be transferrable and the literature has not sufficiently focused on non-transferrable utility games. In such games parties are willing to cooperate and coordinate their strategies to increase their benefits, but have no ability to compensate each other to promote cooperation. To a good extent, the transferrable utility assumption is due to the complexity of calculations to find the best response strategies of agents in non-cooperative and cooperative modes, especially in multi-period games. By combining Reinforcement Learning and Nash bargaining solution, this paper develops a new method for applying cooperative game theory to complex multi-period non-transferrable utility games. For illustration, the suggested method is applied to two numerical examples in which two hydropower operators seek developing a fair and efficient cooperation mechanism to increase their gains.

This article addresses the declared US policy objective of coalition-building between allies and partners within and across regions. While this is a US-led initiative, it also synergises with the NATO-IP4 impetus to enhance cross-regional security cooperation in a way that consolidates linkages between European and Indo-Pacific allies. This article proposes that, in addition to existing or emergent collaboration occurring at the bilateral and multilateral levels (including the NATO-IP4 itself), the objective of coalition-building could prospectively be pursued by leveraging minilateral configurations. This could involve either building new institutional modes of security cooperation or selectively coordinating on specific functional modalities with designated partners drawn from NATO-IP4 membership (or beyond). The contingent result would be to concurrently strengthen allied security cooperation along parallel and interleaving lines of effort for states in Europe and the Indo-Pacific whilst further knitting together a cross-regional ‘latticework’ of American allies and partners.

: This paper presents a comparison of Swedish and U.S. perspectives on actions to reduce vulnerabilities in critical infrastructure when that infrastructure is attacked via Information Operations. It compares the U.S. and the Swedish definitions of Information Operations and offers an example of how Information Operations can be implemented. The paper stresses the need for increased cooperation among governments and increased awareness of a government's needs within the economic environment. With technological advancements occurring mostly in the private sector, no single actor is the owner of a critical information system. Yet information technology and globalization lead to the international arena and demand international cooperation. This paper suggests ways in which different actors (e.g., the Government, information system producers, suppliers of data and telecommunications equipment, financial institutions, insurance companies) can attain cooperation throughout a nation's critical systems. An area of special interest, because of their authority and collaboration in an asymmetric environment, is the role of police and military in protective Information Operations. The paper looks at the issues of global security, technological development, and economics as they affect Information Operations. The author stresses the need for developed forms of public-private cooperation and describes a way to organize traditional domestic responsibilities to keep pace with emerging information technology-related threats. The author also recommends new ways of handling crises and conflicts and enforcing sanctions in the international arena. Recommendations are provided for cross-sector security cooperation within the cabinet and between the State and private sector. (20 refs.)