Evaluation of the proposed European Commission directive on critical entities resilience and its potential to consolidate the resilience terminology

Abstract

The European Commission (EC) has proposed a new directive on critical entities resilience. The aim is to enhance the protection and to unify the approaches in different member states. The stated novelty of this directive lies in the thought that protecting the infrastructure is not sufficient. Therefore, it is necessary to reinforce the resilience of the critical infrastructure operators. This paper gives a brief overview on past legislative developments in critical infrastructure protection and attempts to evaluate the impact of the new EC proposal. We base the estimate on impact analyses past legislation. There are two key findings. EC legislation leaves the implementation to the member states, which gives them a certain freedom to interpret the text of EC directives. This has led to heterogeneous adaptation of the legislation within member states. This kind of heterogeneous impact will likely be also the result of the current proposal. Secondly, EC directives have had mandates for cooperation between member states. These have resulted in member states developing common vocabularies in the focus areas of directives. In the resilience engineering field, this may have a significant consolidating effect, as technological resilience is still a new concept associated with some ambiguity around its definition. Our paper discusses this matter and provides evidence that existing legislation had already a consolidating effect in the resilience engineering field.