What happens when citizens lose trust in the institutions meant to protect their environment? The fight against illegally buried waste in the Croatian city of Gospić has become one of the largest protests in recent Croatian history, raising an important question: What can the public sector learn from local struggles for a clean, healthy environment?

When public institutions talk about environmental and climate policies, they often start from the assumption that the main communication problem is a lack of information: citizens need to better understand what is being done and why.

However, the communication challenge is not only a lack of information. Sometimes the problem is that citizens do not trust the source of that information – the very institutions that are supposed to protect their well-being.

When it comes to the environment, this distrust often has concrete reasons. Almost everyone can point to at least one case of environmental devastation in their own community. Sometimes it involves waste, sometimes construction, an industrial facility, or a business project that alters the landscape or exploits natural resources.

Since the launch of the Klimatski portal, we have been following local struggles for a healthy and clean living environment. For more than a year and a half, we have followed the case (article in Croatian language) of tens of thousands of tonnes of hazardous waste illegally buried and scattered next to the silo of the former Velebit Agricultural and Food Combine (PPK Velebit) in Gospić.

Over that year and a half, the struggle of the citizens’ initiative “Gospić je naš dom” (“Gospić Is Our Home”) has grown into a serious environmental and political crisis in Croatia. At the same time, it has brought long-standing distrust towards the institutions responsible for protecting the environment and public health to the forefront.

This is not only a story about pollution and health risks. It is also a story about what happens when citizens receive no answers from public institutions to questions that directly affect their lives and well-being. Ultimately, it is a story about trust – and what happens when it is lost.

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When communication becomes part of the crisis

As the COVID-19 pandemic – the biggest crisis of this millennium so far – subsided, it quickly became clear why some countries managed it successfully and others – like Croatia – did not. Trust turned out to be the key: countries whose citizens trust their institutions had fewer human casualties.

Croatia, as we are witnessing once again in the current civic struggles to protect the environment, failed to learn that lesson. An analysis of the “Gospić case” reveals two very different approaches that emerged from the beginning. On one side were the state institutions; on the other, the citizens who were demanding answers.

While the citizens’ initiative “Gospić je naš dom” tirelessly tried to obtain information, verify the available data, and explain to the public what the contamination could mean for the local community, the state institutions refused to disclose information and put their efforts into covering up the scale of the problem and the potential risks.

Citizens asked institutions for answers and were met with silence. As the gap widened, so did the distrust. This is an important lesson for crisis communication: what matters is not only what an institution says, but when it says it, what data its statements are based on, and whether citizens can verify the information themselves.

If people fear that the water and soil are polluted and that this could pose a risk to their families’ health (which is the case in Gospić), general reassurances can hardly replace concrete data. If information is made public only after prolonged public pressure (as was the case with the water and soil analyses in Gospić), even accurate and credible information may be met with suspicion.

Once trust has been damaged, managing a crisis that might otherwise have been more contained becomes considerably harder. The state had a choice: to side with the citizens from the start, to pass on information promptly and transparently, to listen to their concerns, to accept good arguments, and to focus on what matters – removing the source of the pollution as quickly as possible to minimise the damage to public health and the environment.

By failing to act responsibly, state institutions further eroded trust and thereby fanned the very crisis they were supposed to be resolving.

Watch out for Part II in the next edition, exploring "Infrastructure of a resilient society" as well as "What does this mean for the green transition?"