Environmental Crisis and the Paradox of Organizing

ABSTRACT Public organizations, including those involved in contingency planning, have tremendous influence over the ultimate scale and scope of an environmental crisis. Yet our understanding of how organizational behavior can either rein in or exacerbate crises continues to lag behind advances in technology. This Article considers the role of public organizations in the blowout of the Macondo well in the Gulf of Mexico. Its theoretical lens is the "paradox of organizing," a frame that I suggest should be applied to interorganizational responses to low-probability, high-consequence events. The struggle to differentiate tasks and subunits and then piece them together during moments of great uncertainty can challenge and strain contingency planning, such as what is envisioned by the National Contingency Plan. Through the paradox of organizing, the organizational roots of a crisis, such as the accidental release of oil or hazardous substances, are recreated and amplified during an interorganizational response to that crisis. I discuss several dynamics that were reproduced by the response system awakened by the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. They included risk amplification and system degradation due to the structure of the response, through processes including "anarchy," "drift," and "fire fighting." They also involved the tasks of making sense of information within the response effort, which erases detail, limits whether data can be used to detect anomalies, and encourages responders to develop their own plausible rationales for equivocal data so that they can resume interrupted tasks. These dynamics go beyond the narratives that dominate standard regulatory accounts of accidents. They point to how multiagency response can intensify the paradox of organizing. TABLE OF CONTENTS I. INTRODUCTION 2064 II. DEEPWATER BLOWOUTS AND THE PARADOX OF ORGANIZING 2072 III. THE ILL-FATED MACONDO WELL: AN INDUSTRIAL CRISIS 2077 IV. NCP v. DWH: THE RESPONSE ARCHITECTURE'S IGNORANCE OF ORGANIZATIONS 2085 A. Interorganizational Dynamics 2088 1. Anarchy 2088 2. Drift 2095 3. Fire fighting 2098 B. Organizational Cognition 2103 1. Schemas 2103 2. Self-limiting data 2106 3. Enactment 2108 V. CONCLUSION 2111 I. INTRODUCTION Environmental law was borne out of crisis.1 Our most storied regulatory achievements happened because shocking and often sudden events - among them the burning Cuyahoga River,2 noxious chemicals in the basements of Love Canal,3 deadly plumes of methyl isocyanate in Bhopal,4 and crude oil strewn across Prince William Sound5 - catalyzed a nascent movement6 and helped overcome the collective action problems that stood in the way of social change.7 In so doing, these focal points8 and the laws they inspired gave federal and state agencies responsibilities that heretofore had been left to private ordering or local governments.9 Forty years into this regulatory experiment, the onset of man-made disasters10 - linked to everything from thermal energy spikes in the lower atmosphere11 to the spread of unruly technologies12 - proceeds apace. Environmental law will continue to revisit these kinds of upheavals, but with unprecedented frequency. …