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Background

  1. In an era marked by escalating geopolitical tensions, complex supply chain interdependencies, and increasingly sophisticated hybrid threats, no single actor - public or private - can ensure national resilience alone.
  2. National and collective resilience are an essential basis for credible deterrence and defence and the effective fulfilment of the Alliance’s core tasks, and vital in our efforts to safeguard our societies, our populations and our shared values.1  Resilience is a national responsibility and a collective commitment rooted in Article 3 of the Washington Treaty.
  3. The private sector owns and operates much of the critical infrastructure that sustains transportation, communications, energy, food and water supply, medicine, government administration, and information flow. Consequently, civil preparedness depends on securing these globalised lifelines against all threats, including cyber-attacks and other hybrid tactics.
  4. At the 2024 Washington Summit, Allies committed to integrating civilian planning into national and collective defence strategies across peace, crisis, and conflict.2  Engagement with the private sector is essential to bolster national and Alliance-wide resilience for deterrence and defence. Particularly in addressing NATO military requirements, it is crucial to incorporate civil and private sector assets, capabilities, and resources to deliver Host Nation Support (HNS) through its supporting Minimum Operational Requirements (MORs).
  5. The private sector is an essential stakeholder in ensuring Allies have secure, reliable access to critical services, supplies, and infrastructure that sustain both Allied armed forces and the functioning of societies. The NATO Baseline Requirements for National Resilience3 underscore the central role of public-private cooperation in NATO’s resilience framework.

Aim and scope

  1. The Guidance for Enhancing Public-Private Cooperation for Resilience aims at providing national civil and military authorities with practical recommendations  for fostering public-private partnerships that ensure the continuity of essential private sector services and resources for both the civilian population and the military during crises and conflicts.
  2. This guidance does not impose new legal obligations. Instead, it consolidates proven practices, emerging innovations, and lessons learned from recent crises, which can be adapted to each Ally’s national context through three mutually reinforcing lines of effort:
    • Creating the pre-conditions for cooperation through clear governance, shared methodologies, and flexible legal and investment frameworks;
    • Ensuring continuity of essential services to the civilian population by embedding key stakeholders of the private sector in information sharing, planning, training and exercises; and
    • ·Ensuring civil support to the military via standing coordination cells, end-to-end supply-assurance programmes, and ready-to-activate legal and contractual tools.
  3. The guidance is offered as a practical tool to assist NATO Allies in designing and building a truly “whole-of-society” approach tailored to their national context - one that safeguards vital societal functions, maintains essential services for the civilian population, strengthens deterrence efforts, and mobilises civil support to the military across the spectrum from peace to armed conflict.
  4. Taken together, the individual guidelines foster a culture of trust, transparency, and mutual benefit: governments gain assured access to private sector capabilities, while the private sector obtains the predictability, information, and incentives necessary to invest proactively in resilience. Allies are encouraged to adapt these guidelines on a voluntary basis to their national contexts; and implement them in collaboration with regional and local stakeholders.
  5. The national adoption and implementation of this guidance, in accordance with national competencies and legal frameworks, will strengthen collective security by also safeguarding the everyday continuity of our economies and communities.

Guidance for enhancing public-private cooperation for resilience

Objective 1: Create the necessary pre-conditions for public-private cooperation to achieve resilience

Resilience Governance Framework

  1. Ensure a whole-of-government resilience governance structure at national level, that encompasses all resilience baseline requirements (e.g., Interagency Resilience Working Groups). Ensure that national priorities and actions are effectively coordinated with the private sector.
  2. Ensure that the resilience governance structure includes relevant private sector representatives, and that their roles are clearly communicated and well known to other key private sector stakeholders, fostering inclusive participation and enhancing the visibility of private sector contribution to national resilience efforts.
  3. Identify and ensure designated points of contact within the government/agencies for each resilience baseline requirement, with clear roles and responsibilities, including cross-sector collaboration to address interdependencies, to facilitate continuous coordination and communication between public and private sector stakeholders.
  4. Leverage existing national, multilateral, and private sector-led fora (e.g. associations, sector-based, and operational groups) to enable public-private cooperation for resilience baseline requirements, in peacetime, crisis and conflict. Engage these fora regularly and exchange resilience best practices and lessons learned between the public and private sectors.
  5. Identify critical systems and infrastructure, essential service suppliers, and private sector stakeholders critical to ensuring the continuity of government and delivery of essential services to the civilian population as well as provision of civil support to the military.
  6. Ensure that with private sector support, operational continuity and system redundancy requirements are identified for critical national infrastructure.
  7. Ensure and strengthen the body of knowledge, research, innovation, and guidance to advance public-private cooperation in the resilience baseline areas, ensuring consistent private sector involvement with clear roles and responsibilities, examples and best practices, including through rapid adoption of novel technologies - including those that leverage Emerging and Disruptive Technologies (EDTs) - for resilience.
  8. Ensure and strengthen resilience frameworks through collaborative, cross-sectoral approaches to risk identification, assessments, and analytical processes that fully integrate private sector participation.
  9. Identify and ensure appropriate incentive mechanisms for private sector participation in resilience governance (e.g. indemnity arrangements, insurance provisions, such as in the example of the Alliance’s relationship with the commercial space sector), so that private sector stakeholders are motivated to assume additional responsibilities during crises and conflicts. These measures should articulate the mutual value proposition for private entities, balancing obligations with tangible benefits, and ensuring sustained engagement across essential sectors.
  10. Ensure a coordinated, multi-sector risk management cycle to mitigate threats, vulnerabilities, and capability gaps across government, military, and essential service providers to promote a comprehensive approach, shared situational awareness for priorities of action and timely response.
  11. Identify and ensure trust-building mechanisms for continuous and long-term cooperation between public and relevant private stakeholders, stressing corporate responsibilities. This includes continuous dialogue platforms for regular engagement during peacetime, information sharing, pre-crisis, and post-crisis networking opportunities to strengthen relationships, and effective conflict-resolution channels to address disputes before they escalate.

Methodology

  1. Involve the relevant private sector representatives in national crisis scenario identification, strategic-foresight activities and processes, (e.g., capability-based planning) covering civil-military needs, economic/financial/dual-use technology/trade exposure, supply-chain vulnerabilities, scientific and technological Research and Development (R&D) and cyber- and hybrid threats. This ensures private sector awareness of civil and military requirements and the scope and scale of threats while promoting regular information sharing.
  2. Ensure planning guidance (e.g. continuity planning) is available to private entities, especially essential service providers during peacetime to prepare for hybrid, sabotage, and cyber threats, using shared national scenarios as a baseline for resilience.
  3. Identify opportunities and engage private sector stakeholders in joint national executive training and full-scale exercises to test national frameworks and create conditions for joint participation. Link NATO and national civilian and defence planning to private-sector business-continuity requirements (e.g., redundancies) to ensure whole-of-society readiness in delivering essential services.
  4. Identify priority areas where innovation (R&D, new technologies, including EDTs, novel finance) can most effectively enhance resilience and guide strategic resource investment decisions.
  5. Identify opportunities towards ensuring participation of private sector stakeholders in real-time crisis communications & information sharing. Identify mechanisms to regularly share incident threat updates and clear, taskings with private sector entities to ensure situational awareness and readiness to support response. Develop secure channels to facilitate classified digital information sharing between cleared service providers and public authorities (i.e., civil and military) during crisis and conflict.
  6. Ensure a national resilience investment framework that encourages private sector participation and deploys burden-sharing (e.g., mutual need / mutual benefit), risk-sharing (e.g., war risk insurance), and dual-use innovation incentives to attract private capital.  Use targeted investment vehicles and remove regulatory barriers that hinder effective crisis response or limit private sector participation in national resilience efforts.
  7. Identify alternative products and production lines in coordination with private sector stakeholders that the private sector can mobilise during crisis and conflict.
  8. Identify and ensure access to critical supply chains in coordination with private sector stakeholders for crisis and conflict situations.

Legal and Practical Arrangements

  1. Identify and ensure a means to deconflict legislative obstacles, including standards, to meet civil and military requirements during crisis and conflict.
  2. Ensure a flexible legal toolkit, including standing cooperative agreements, fast-track emergency procedures, regulatory exemptions (i.e., labour agreements, human resources), and continuity obligations, that governs public-private collaboration before, during, and after crisis and conflict, ensuring executive readiness to engage in public-private cooperation activities.
  3. Ensure transparency and mutual trust in all aspects of decision-making authorities, information sharing, resource allocation, antitrust compliance, intellectual property protections, procurement procedures, competition regulations and the avoidance of conflicts of interest.
  4. Ensure that a unified information-sharing architecture integrates relevant private sector   stakeholders through a single coordinated approach with clear legal/ethical protocols, classification-based workflows, standard information sharing policies and processes, and interoperable technical platforms connecting government and the private sector at unclassified and classified levels.
  5. Identify opportunities and ensure formal information protection mechanisms that incentivise sharing of sensitive, proprietary and other critical infrastructure information while addressing private sector concerns regarding security of their commercially sensitive information.
  6. Ensure integration of civil-military coordination mechanisms, supported by policy, legal, and resource-allocation frameworks, to prioritise and deconflict personnel, equipment, and supplies from peacetime through armed conflict. This may include leveraging reserve forces employed across both civil and military organisations, such as specialist reserves across infrastructure, cyber, and utilities.
  7. Ensure that security clearances are provided (where appropriate) to essential private sector stakeholders and their employees, including methods to incentivise participation, and to maintain and effectively utilise those clearances.
  8. Ensure the development and adoption of comprehensive contractual frameworks and contracts that guarantee private-sector support to both military operations and essential civilian services. This should legally bind and enforce continuation of critical service delivery and ensure overall economic resilience during crisis and conflict.
  9. Identify and ensure procedures, mandates, and liability protections (e.g., information sharing protections) for critical infrastructure operators to notify civil authorities of outages or resource restrictions or disruptions which may impact the required support to military operations.
  10. Identify opportunities to ensure provision of technical capacity building support, including templates, training, and shared resources to essential providers, including small, medium and large enterprises, to raise the overall awareness of resilience baselines to ensure business continuity of essential services providers.
  11. Ensure coordination with transnational companies, especially operating in neighbouring countries, to harmonise standards, mutual-aid protocols, and service-continuity expectations across borders in order to maintain cross-border continuity and support coordinated international assistance.
  12. Identify and ensure national “resilient-by-design” guidance and standards so that new infrastructure and program investments inherently enhance security of supply, including guidance for stockpiling essential goods and establishing virtual warehousing capabilities.

Objective 2: Ensure that essential services are provided to the civilian population during crisis and conflict

Coordination and Information Sharing

  1. Ensure relevant hazard and threat information sharing between public and private sector stakeholders.
  2. Ensure joint or coordinated risk assessment and continuous sharing of situational awareness (e.g., state and non-state threats), and issue regular updates to owners and operators of essential services.
  3. Ensure the effective use of civil-military operational response coordination capabilities and continuous improvement of processes to address supply needs, deconflict between and contractually allocate critical supplies and services to military requirements and civilian needs.
  4. Ensure the use of operational coordination capacities for public-private assistance to facilitate real-time offers and requests, mobilise mixed response teams, and maintain a continuously updated dashboard of supply levels, logistics routes, and critical materials.

Risk Management

  1. Ensure that existing incident-driven joint analysis teams work together immediately after an event. In addition, bring public and private sector experts together to conduct scenario-based risk assessments and issue mitigation recommendations.
  2. Ensure that government security and cyber-defence assets are employed to empower critical providers to protect the infrastructure and personnel that deliver essential services in crisis and conflict. This includes use of selected methods to prioritise critical infrastructure and identify clear roles and responsibilities for all stakeholders (i.e., public, private, military) in infrastructure protection.
  3. Ensure the maximum exploitation of new technology, including EDTs, for essential services through public-private collaboration on digital interoperability, risk management planning and testing exercises. 
  4. Ensure collaboration to map, assess, and mitigate challenges (or de-risk) cross-border interdependencies by working with neighbouring nations and transnational firms to identify cascading risks in shared infrastructure and supply chains.

Training and Communication

  1. Ensure availability of crisis response training and education for essential-service staff, and provide training to employees on their crisis-specific responsibilities, ensuring rapid and coordinated action.
  2. Ensure the issuance of clear national response priorities and communication guidance, including predefined priority lists and pre-authorised messaging, to help suppliers and employees understand their roles and expectations.
  3. Ensure clear public communications and transparency protocols for prioritisation of essential services, developed in consultation with the private sector, to sustain trust in public-private decision-making. Provide clear guidance to owners and operators of essential services on how, what and when to communicate with end users.

Objective 3: Ensure that civil support is provided to the military during crisis and conflict

Roles and Responsibilities

  1. Ensure civil-military planning and operational response coordination. Identify vital societal functions, essential civilian service providers and key stakeholders required to support the military, particularly in a Host Nation Support context, and involve them from initial planning through execution to align requirements, resources, and decision-making.
  2. Ensure the issuance of clear national response priorities and communication guidance to the private sector through appropriate channels. Identify requirements for private sector support to the military through clear, unclassified communications that can be shared without violating security protocols to enable effective coordination between civilian authorities and the private sector to meet military requirements.
  3. Ensure the use of mechanisms that include civilian and private sector stakeholders in relevant aspects of military operations from the start of planning.
  4. Promote the recruitment, retention and integration of reserve forces into operational resilience processes, and investigate opportunities for employer support for reserve personnel, particularly in specialist technical domains critical to resilience efforts (e.g. cyber).
  5. Ensure the use of public-private operational coordination strategies and mechanisms (e.g., business emergency operation centres) to provide scalable civil intersectoral support for specific military requirements.

Governance Frameworks

  1. Ensure the activation and tasking of resilience governance structures at national level across the resilience baseline requirements (e.g., Resilience Interagency Working Groups) to revise and coordinate civil support requirements and plans for public and private sector services and commodities needed for Host Nation Support.
  2. Activate dormant contracts, voluntary cooperation agreements, and emergency legal authorities that address peacetime impediments giving governments the authority to swiftly mobilise private capacity, nationally and internationally.
  3. Ensure regular use and auditing of continuity-of-operations plans for critical providers. Ensure private sector capacity to serve both civilian and military needs, and codify when and how civilian assets may be employed or withheld during the crisis or conflict.
  4. Ensure recurring civil-military exercises with active private sector participation.Test mechanisms of civil support to the military, validate contracts and legal triggers, and rehearse rapid scaling of supply and repair capacity, even in contested environments. Utilise these exercises to validate/update military planning assumptions and requirements.

Identification of Key Mechanisms and Capabilities

  1. Ensure the use of national mechanisms that provide end-to-end supply-assurance, such as:
    1. Specification of requirements for national military and Host Nation Support purposes (i.e., quantities, duration, and priority levels);
    2. Mapping of entire supply chains (from raw materials to final products) for critical items, and evaluate their resilience and availability under crisis scenarios at appropriate classification levels;
    3. Engagement with private-sector stakeholders to secure alternate sources, identify substitute materials for critical uses, enable surge production, and mitigate potential cross-border bottlenecks;
    4. Identification of appropriate decision-making mechanisms for prioritising limited resources between competing critical civilian and military needs;
    5. Joint evaluation (i.e., civil-military-private sector) of the supply chain of essential goods to ensure adequate capacity to meet national military or Host Nation Support requirements; and
    6. Assessment of stockpiling capacity for critical raw materials, in partnership with private sector stakeholders.
  2. Ensure use of joint mobility/counter-mobility support. Coordinate public and private sector capabilities for route clearance, bridging, and other enablers of force movement.
  3. Ensure the swift repair of critical infrastructure and recovery of essential services. Jointly plan and identify necessary response, recovery and repair efforts across peace, crisis and conflict scenarios, consistent with national prioritisation of critical infrastructure provided by the private sector.
  4. Ensure incorporation of new technologies, such as additive manufacturing (AM), into national civil-military logistics planning. Leverage NATO nations’ collaborative research on AM challenges for operations and logistics. AM capabilities can ensure rapid production of critical spare parts and components, reducing dependence on fragile supply chains. Integrate military AM capacity into national planning to support civilian resilience when appropriate, and prepare civilian AM facilities to surge support to military logistics and operations during crisis and conflict.
  5. Ensure incorporation of space-based systems and services, particularly those supporting civilian infrastructure relevant to the NATO Baseline Requirements, into civil-military resilience planning. A closer relationship with trusted commercial space partners, providing data, products, and services is crucial.

National best practices on public-private cooperation

Footnotes

1. Vilnius Summit Communiqué, paragraph 61.

2. Washington Summit Declaration, paragraph 12.

3. NATO’s seven baseline requirements are: assured continuity of government and critical government services, resilient energy supplies, ability to deal effectively with uncontrolled movement of people, resilient food and water resources, ability to deal with mass casualties and disruptive health crises, resilient civil communications systems and resilient civil transportation systems.  

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