Analysis of the integrity of district crisis management plans in Poland

This paper discusses the integrity of Crisis Management Plans (CMP) in Poland. Integrity is understood as the unified way of developing the CMP by different public administration entities. On the one hand, quantifying the scale of CMPs discrepancies is essential for estimating public administration readiness to assess threat risk on a national scale. On the other hand, recognizing the nature of the discrepancy may allow one to identify corrective actions to raise the level of CMPs effectiveness. However, there are no quantitative measurements of discrepancies of CMPs elements in Poland. Here, we fill this gap in the body of knowledge and quantify integrity and the scale of CMPs discrepancies. We analyze the scope of collected data and the form of their presentation in different CMP components. The study includes an analysis of CMPs developed at the district level in 2013-2015. To quantify integrity, we develop an evaluation template based on the formal and legal conditions in force. We use it to quantify the integrity in terms of the data presentation form and the completeness of the data set. The National Crisis Management Plan from the same period was used as a reference. We show that CMPs differ from the adopted benchmark in data presentation and the collected data set. It is worth emphasizing that the observed differences in data collection are mainly due to the lack of the element under consideration in CMPs. The observed differences may cause difficulties in the flow and aggregation of data and impede assessing the risk of threats.