Abstract
Protecting society from devastating disasters is a fundamental function of the modern state. In this respect, the concept of resilience to disasters (and the application thereof) has enjoyed a steep rise in popularity in the civil security policymaking and crisis management over the last years.
Most importantly, it stresses the need for a broad involvement of stakeholders in the prevention, mitigation and response efforts. In this respect, however, the European countries differ significantly.
While in some countries (such as e.g. the Netherlands), the civil security provision is highly privatized, in other countries the opposite is the case and most of the civil security-related activities rest upon the state. Similarly, the importance of civic organizations' involvement differs significantly.
It is the aim of this paper to shed more light on these differences, framing the findings within the security governance approach (Krahmann 2003) and within the overall trends in civil society involvement in security matters (Dembinski, Joachim 2014). The paper analyzes the private sector involvement in civil security in the European countries.
Firstly, the role of the societal, non-profit organizations is examined. Secondly, the role of profit-oriented organizations in the civil security provision is studied.
Particular attention is paid to the post-communist new member states of the EU. It is examined whether these represent a distinctive group with specific patterns of (rather low) private involvement in the civil security provision (path-dependency hypothesis) or whether more universal patterns apply.
To achieve this, a comparative study of twenty-two European countries is conducted, based on the data gathered within a large-scale collaborative research project (European Commission's FP7 project ANVIL). The final part of the paper, then, turns to the scale of the involvement of private actors in civil security and examines it with respect to the effectiveness of conduct.