Assessing Cooperation of Civil and Public Entities While Fighting the Oder River Contamination—As an Element of Civil Protection in Poland

Contamination of waters can be caused by exogenous (e.g. natural, human-made, malicious) or endogenous (e.g. ageing) factors and have an extensive impact in terms of population affected, economic losses, environmental, political, psychological effects and public health consequences for the whole ecosystem in local as well as cross-border scale. The efficient response to the crisis situation which is usually unpredicted and uncontrolled with a potential cascading or compound effect can be a challenge even for very well organized DRM Systems. The response requires multi-stakeholder collaboration, with support of an exchange of expertise to yield expected end results—sustainable recovery of the ecosystem. The described problem situation can be illustrated with the case of the contamination of the Oder River in 2022. The chapter presents how public institutions and non-governmental organizations engaged in crisis situation, perceived their roles, recognized partners and the public opinion. The conclusions are based on public discourse analysis.