From Perception to Policy Support: Public Situation Awareness and the Sustainability of Critical Infrastructure

The long-term resilience and sustainability of critical infrastructure depends not only on technical robustness but also on the capacity of populations to collectively interpret systemic threats and support continuity-preserving policies. Existing frameworks for emergency response and risk perception primarily address individual-level threat appraisal, leaving insufficiently explained how publics collectively interpret systemic threats under conditions of unfamiliar disruption. This study introduces Public Situation Awareness (PSA) as a sequential mechanism through which citizens perceive threat-relevant information, comprehend its implications for collective welfare, and project cascading consequences across essential societal systems, ultimately supporting system-preserving prioritization policies. The framework was tested using a survey administered in Israel in April 2024 during a period of acute uncertainty surrounding the threat of a large-scale attack on critical infrastructure. Serial mediation analyses using bootstrapping revealed that the full sequential pathway: perception, public-level comprehension, public-level projection, and policy support, was the only significant indirect effect, whereas pathways involving individual-level projection did not reach significance. These findings provide preliminary evidence that support for continuity-preserving governance may depend more strongly on collective than personal interpretation of systemic consequences, with implications for crisis communication strategies and the social foundations of infrastructure resilience aligned with SDG 9 and SDG 11.