Realizing the promise of public-private partnerships in U.S. critical infrastructure protection

To date, much attention has focused on the advantages of public-private partnerships for critical infrastructure protection in the United States. These include reducing the duplication of effort, enhancing cross-sector communication, increasing efficiency, and ultimately achieving the protection objectives better than government or business acting independently. The benefits suggest that public-private partnerships will be a significant and enduring part of critical infrastructure protection initiatives in the United States. However, we argue that a pattern is emerging that may lead to a fracture between the appearance and the reality of public-private partnerships in U.S. critical infrastructure protection. Although some research has focused on specific challenges in this domain of U.S. homeland security, comparatively little attention has been paid to thinking through the issues facing critical infrastructure protection as a whole. We maintain that unless concrete steps are taken to bolster public-private partnerships in critical infrastructure protection, they will be much less effective than hoped for by U.S. homeland security analysts.