A recent trilateral powwow originally designed to focus on economic and security issues across Canada, Mexico and the United States, has become the principal venue through which said countries are coordinating their pandemic preparedness efforts. What this coordination entails is an interesting question. A recent piece from the informative CIDRAP news service describes a recently released report detailing some of the issues the countries see themselves facing. One issue (comprising one chapter in this report): critical infrastructure. One strategy to tackle the problem of critical infrastructure protection: Resiliency. None of this is surprising or new. What is interesting, to me anyway, is how these concepts will ‘operate’ or be actualized in practice in and across these different national contexts. Is there such a thing as North American Critical Infrastructure? How about North American Resiliency?

For some reason, all of this calls to mind the notion of “regionalization”, which has been pushed — albeit not very hard — by a number of federal agencies and states which foresee advantages to realizing efficiencies in preparedness efforts — check out an example from AHRQ here. These efficiencies are based not only in economics, per se, but in geographies as well. Counties have banded together, as have states, in a variety of different emergency services and disaster preparedness contexts (e.g., one EMS agency covering several counties; states and counties signing mutual aid agreements in times of need, etc.) for decades. The dynamics of multinational ‘regionalization,’ I suspect, is substantially different.