The Exxon Valdez disaster: environmental safety implementation in an incrementalist mode

Abstract

This article develops a view on environmental risk as produced by some of the dynamics of human organization, i.e. political and economic as well as communicative factors acting together to create a failure-prone context. The empirical focus is the implementation of environmental safety that grew out of many years of inter-organizational interaction between the oil industry and regulatory agencies in Alaska, and which was highlighted by the notorious Exxon Valdez oil-spill in 1989. In the article it is argued that failure to prepare for (or to avoid) a catastrophe of this kind represents a safety implementation failure, and that such a failure usually encompasses systemic causes stretching far beyond the immediate context of the actual occurrence of the event. The study sets out to show how, in the Exxon Valdez case, the failure of an inter-organizational culture to implement basic safety measures resulted from an incremental but systematic decrease in regulatory control, the emergence of counterproductive bargaining between corporate bodies, conflict-oriented policy-making with respect to oil-spill hazards and a misjudgement of the potential outcomes of an oil spill.