Infrastructures have become more and more critical to the functioning of society, as economic and social processes to a large extent rely on the services provided by such systems. Failure of these infrastructures, therefore, is one of the most important vulnerabilities of modern society. In addition and simultaneously much change is taking place within and around these infrastructures. This change includes: increasingly rapid technological change, rapid institutional change, increasing system complexity, increasing trans-boundary dependencies, tensions between market concerns addressing...

Traditional policy analysis approaches are characterized by a focus on system modeling and choosing among policy alternatives. While successful in many cases, this approach has been increasingly criticized for being technocratic and ignoring the behavioral and political dimensions of most policy processes. In recent decades, increased awareness of the multi-actor, multiple perspective, and poly-centric character of many policy processes has led to the development of a variety of different perspectives on the styles and roles of policy analysis, and to new analytical tools and approaches -...

Critical Infrastructures: State of the Art in Research and Application, comprising a selection of reviewed and edited contributions from all over the world, aims to shed light on the various aspects of critical infrastructures. The editors of this book have opted for a broad view on the various criticality aspects on infrastructures itself as well as contributions that discuss the institutional and technical environment of critical infrastructures which are crucial for their proper functioning.

Critical Infrastructures brings to light a number of...