Myth of the Monolithic Private Sector Presentation at the 2026 CESA Conference
Posted May 8, 2026
On Wednesday, May 6th, the California Resiliency Alliance presented a session at the California Emergency Services Association’s (CESA) annual conference in San Diego. The session, titled The Myth of the Monolithic Private Sector: Strategies for Better Engagement and Collaboration, challenged emergency managers to rethink one of the more common trends in the field: that “the private sector” can be treated as a single, unified entity.
The presentation opened by discussing the “Monolith Problem” — the tendency to lump the private sector into one category, and why that approach undermines effective collaboration and disaster response. A corollary was drawn back to the era when the ‘general public’ was treated as a single entity. Today we acknowledge that there are different communities of people within the ‘general public’ and that engagement is not a one-size-fits-all. The same evolution in thinking is now needed for how we understand and engage ‘the private sector.’
Private sector actions and continuity decisions can directly shape life safety outcomes, infrastructure stabilization and restoration timelines, and the pace of community recovery. As a result, the operational choices of private sector entities fundamentally influence public sector response and recovery.
Community Lifelines vs. National Critical Functions — Two Frameworks, Each for a Different Purpose
The session explored two complementary frameworks for how private sector actions intersect with broader emergency management and resilience:
FEMA’s Community Lifelines were originally designed as a response visualization tool that provides a common operating picture during an active incident — a way for an EOC to quickly communicate the status of 8 broad functional categories to leadership, mutual aid partners, and the public.
DHS’s National Critical Functions offer a risk and dependency mapping tool built around a fundamentally different question: what functions must the nation — or region — be able to perform, and who, across both government and the private sector, is responsible for performing them?
Nonprofits — They Are Not All Structured the Same
Since public sector emergency managers tend to have greater familiarity with nonprofits than with for-profit businesses, less time was dedicated to this segment — but the session still highlighted the remarkable diversity of the nonprofit world by showing the dozens of different tax-exempt organization types recognized by the IRS.
Three types were then examined in greater depth: 501(c)(3) public benefit organizations, 501(c)(4) civic and social welfare organizations, and 501(c)(6) business leagues — each operating under different missions, funding structures, and constraints that shape how they engage during emergencies.
Businesses — What Shapes Their Decisions
The session then turned its focus to for-profit businesses, examining six dimensions that influence how companies behave and make decisions during emergencies. Rather than treating all businesses as equivalent, the session offered a framework for mapping companies across meaningful spectrums — and understanding what those positions mean for engagement.
Dimension 1: Ownership Structure looked at where a company falls on the spectrum from fully privately held to publicly traded with no majority shareholders, and the degree of private equity ownership. These variables matter because planning horizons are directly influenced by shareholder and owner dynamics. Publicly traded companies also carry additional reporting requirements and information-sharing restrictions designed to prevent market manipulation, which can limit what they are able to communicate before, during, and after an incident, even when they want to be transparent. Additionally, private equity tends to operate under two different models — growth-oriented strategies focused on scaling the business and increasing its value over time, or value extraction models focused on maximizing near-term returns — each of which shapes business priorities and decision-making in ways that have real implications for resilience planning and engagement.
Dimension 2: Geographic Scope mapped companies from single-location operations to those with a very large footprint, and from highly localized internal decision-making to teams that operate at the regional or above levels. This dimension is critical for emergency managers to understand because private sector teams at larger companies may have limited bandwidth to maintain local relationships, and the degree of local decision-making authority varies significantly from company to company. A local point of contact may be relationship-friendly, but have very little actual authority when it matters most.
Dimension 3: Separation of Functions and Outsourcing examined two related variables: how separated a company’s internal functions are — from a single person wearing many hats to fully distinct specialized teams — and the degree to which operations are outsourced or franchised. This dimension surfaces one of the most commonly overlooked complexities in private sector engagement: a single physical location may be owned by one company, managed by another, leased by a third, and have security provided by an entirely different vendor. Additionally, with franchising, the same brand name does not necessarily mean the same ownership or leadership. For companies with distinct internal teams, communications across those layered structures may be limited even under normal conditions — let alone during a disaster.
Dimension 4: Regulatory Environment plotted companies along two axes: the degree of federal oversight and the degree of state and local oversight. Understanding a company’s regulatory environment matters because those regulations both constrain what a business can do and shape the capacity it has built to respond. A heavily regulated utility operates very differently from a lightly regulated local retailer, even if both are affected by the same incident. Importantly, regulations can vary even within subsectors — banks and credit unions, for example, operate under different regulatory frameworks despite serving similar functions within the same broad industry.
Dimension 5: Market Dynamics considered the influence of profit margins and the degree of control that certain customers can exert over their vendors. Slim profit margins can directly limit a company’s capacity to invest in engagement activities with local jurisdictions — there simply may not be discretionary resources available. At the same time, large or powerful customers can in some cases effectively dictate terms to their suppliers, adding constraints to those companies that emergency managers may not be aware of when trying to understand why a company is behaving in a particular way.
Dimension 6: Facility Dynamics shifted the lens from the company level down to the individual facility level, because not all facilities within a company are equally critical. This dimension plotted two variables: the level of impact if a site goes down or access is restricted, and the degree to which activities at that facility can be performed remotely. Understanding which facilities are truly mission-critical — and what it actually takes to keep them functioning — is essential for realistic planning and meaningful engagement.
Building Relationships — Bridging Across the Sectors
The final segment focused on building relationships with the private sector. This section highlighted several key principles and practical considerations:
Actions of Others Affect You: When building relationships, the private sector individual you are engaging will likely already carry a history of interactions with other public sector entities — and that history will shape how they engage with you, for better or worse.
Outreach Alignment — Who Is Reaching Out to Whom: Effective engagement requires deliberate alignment between who from the public sector is reaching out and who from the private sector they are connecting with. Mismatched contact points are a common and underappreciated barrier to productive partnerships.
Memorandums of Understanding: MOUs are a common tactic in the public sector, but they often fall flat with private sector partners — particularly for-profit businesses — where an MOU is typically views in terms of a contract, not a statement of intent.
Integration into Plans: Current plans typically do not effectively capture the division of Whole of Community responsibilities for critical functions. The City of Denver Emergency Operations Plan was highlighted as an example of one that has made a meaningful attempt to integrate the private sector more explicitly. That said, it is important to remember that, with few exceptions, the public sector cannot mission task the private sector.
Learn to Work in a “Multi-Lingual” Environment: When working across sectors, there is no single “right” lexicon. Effective engagement requires adaptability in language and framing.
Design for Inclusivity: If you are inviting private sector entities to exercises, ensure that the exercises are designed to be inclusive of them and not treating them as an afterthought in exercise design.
Relationships Don’t Survive a Vacuum: Sustained partnerships require steady-state, value-add engagement between incidents. What does that look like for your jurisdiction — and how are you understanding “value-add” from the private sector’s perspective?
Know Your Audience: Pitching preparedness basics to a room full of credentialed business continuity professionals signals that you don’t understand who you’re talking to, and it can permanently undermine the credibility and trust you need to build a real partnership.
The session closed with a reframe that cuts to the heart of the issue: rather than asking “Have we engaged the private sector?” — a question that implies a checkbox — emergency managers should be asking “Which entities? Which contacts? For what purpose?” That shift in thinking can transform surface-level outreach into real, functional partnerships.
