Waiting for Crisis: Regulatory Inaction and Ineptitude and the Guadalupe Dunes Oil Spill

Abstract

Swift and ameliorative governmental response to a range of threatening circumstances is crucial to public health and safety. This is especially the case given the expanding role such "control organizations" play in modern life. In this capacity, government organizations are in a position to arbitrate "acceptable risk" by either pursuing issues that affect the public or not. With this as its backdrop, this paper analyzes governmental response to a petroleum spill that over four decades of unmitigated leaks became the United State's largest on record. Using notions of "organized anarchy," modified to address an inter-organizational decision-making context, it is shown that regulators' incapacity to act on this toxic yet non-acute hazard was the interactive outcome of 1) crescive trouble: a genre of "problem" government administrators are not organized to detect and 2) organized anarchy: organizational coordination difficulties that further hampered inter-agency cooperation and problem interdiction. The organizational response this spill gained exemplifies shortcomings found in the way administrative systems manage and respond to "a crisis in the making." The analysis and conclusions drawn have implications for a range of nascent social problems that under current institutional mandates are left to fester until they manifest as acute traumas or involve substantial immiseration.

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