9/15/2023 0 Comments infrastructuresEnergy production and circulation systems belong to critical infrastructure systems. In European policy- making, critical infrastructures refer to ‘assets, systems or parts of systems […] which are of vital importance for the function and continuity in domains which are vital for the society’s security, health, economic and social welfare, and the interruption or destruction of which would have a major negative impact’ (Council Directive 2008/114/EC). The US Committee of Critical Infrastructure Protection (CCIP 1997) lists a number of hard andsoft infrastructures as examples: transportation, oil and gas production and storage, water supply, emergency services, government services (including education, childcare and healthcare), banking and finance, electrical power and information and communications (see also Kenton 2018; Filion & Keil 2016).
Until recently, social science had mostly approached infrastructures as economic–material entities embodying a process of social order and control that organised the social fabric (Humphrey 2006; Edwards 2003; Castells 1996). But this conception is particularly related to the post-World War II paradigm of state governance that initiated large-scale, centralised construction of hard and soft infrastructures, aiming to increase economic growth and ensuring wider social consensus (Graham & Marvin 2001; Dalakoglou 2009). In the case of Europe, by the 1980s this model had moved towards the more neoliberal paradigm of public–private partnership (PPP) in infrastructure construction and governance. This model was linked to the growth and renewal of European infrastructural stock between the mid-1990s and the mid-2000s, partly due to wider historical transformations – including the fall of socialism and European integration (Dalakoglou 2009, 2016a). Nevertheless, the global financial crisis of 2007-8 followed by pandemic crisis and war in the continent; in combination with the almost simultaneous Green Transition of Europe, have created a new model in the history of infrastructures, that one could label the age of social participation.
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