Policy Paper – September 2025

Governing Infrastructure for the Public Good and a Sustainable Future

Essential services such as energy, water, transport, and telecommunications form the backbone of Europe’s societies and economies. Their uninterrupted functioning ensures societal well-being, public safety, and economic continuity. Yet, these Critical Infrastructures (CIs) face mounting pressures from climate change, technological disruption, and fragmented governance structures.

To address these challenges, the EU-funded Horizon Europe project SUNRISE has released a new policy paper:

“Governing Infrastructure for the Public Good and a Sustainable Future: Aligning Resilience, Sustainability, and Equity”

Key Findings

The policy brief highlights the urgent need to move beyond narrow risk-based approaches and instead adopt comprehensive governance frameworks that embed public interest, sustainability, and resilience. Four key challenges stand out:

1. Fragmented Governance Across Levels
   Overlapping and sometimes contradictory EU, national, and local regulations create inefficiencies and compliance burdens. This fragmentation undermines coherent responses and slows down innovation, particularly in water utilities.

2. Outdated Regulations Blocking Innovation
   Current licensing regimes and enforcement mechanisms often privilege traditional infrastructure models and delay the uptake of technologies such as UAV-based inspections or advanced AI-driven demand prediction systems.

3. Unsustainable Financing Models
   Utilities remain heavily reliant on subsidies and public transfers, limiting their capacity to mobilise long-term private investments. This structural financing gap constrains efforts to adapt to climate change and modernise infrastructure.

4. Deficient Metrics for Public Good
   Existing performance indicators fail to capture the wider economic, social, and environmental externalities of CIs, leading to systematic undervaluation of sustainable and resilient solutions.

Policy Recommendations

The SUNRISE project proposes four directions to bridge these gaps:

1. Develop Multi-Level Indicators of Public Value
   Establish measurement systems that capture broader impacts—including social equity, environmental sustainability, and indirect spillovers—ensuring that resilience is assessed in terms of societal benefit, not only efficiency.

2. Secure Balanced Financing Frameworks
   Move towards shared responsibility models that combine EU funds, national subsidies, tariffs, and public–private partnerships, ensuring predictable long-term investments while distributing risks fairly.

3. Modernise and Harmonise Regulations
   Update outdated frameworks to enable adoption of innovative technologies (e.g., UAV inspections, AI-based demand prediction) and strengthen enforcement mechanisms to ensure compliance with sustainability and resilience obligations.

4. Embed Transparency, Ethics, and Participation
   Promote trust in digital and AI-based solutions by enforcing strong privacy protections, mitigating algorithmic bias, and institutionalising impact assessments that account for ethical and social considerations.

Why This Matters

Resilient infrastructure is not only about protecting assets—it is about safeguarding public health, ensuring equitable access to essential services, supporting regional development, and addressing environmental sustainability. Without reforms in governance, financing, and accountability, utilities risk remaining structurally constrained, unable to meet the EU’s long-term climate and resilience goals.

By systematically aligning infrastructure governance with public good objectives, Europe can ensure that its CIs are not only resistant to disruption but also drivers of societal well-being and sustainable development.

Download the full Policy Paper PDF here: Policy brief_Public good_Sustainability

Contributors:
Nikolay Zherdev, Liliana Mateeva, Olivier Klein, Christine Nam, Laurens Bouwer, Yoel Siegel, Christian Kimmich (SUNRISE Project).

Acknowledgments
The work presented in this policy paper was conducted under the SUNRISE project, funded by the European Union’s Horizon Europe programme (Grant Agreement No.101073831). Views expressed are those of the authors only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Research Executive Agency (REA). Neither the EU nor the REA can be held responsible for them.