Oil spill events : prominent frames and policy implications

Nigg, JoanneThe purposes of this thesis are twofold; to gain insight through the lens of framing as to how the framing of a spill influences policy change and discern how competing frames affect policy. The second is to offer new recommendations to help bridge the safety gap the industry currently experiences, exposed by these three spills. For this study, three oil spills were chosen due to the considerable policy changes they invoked, the media attention they garnered, and their size; the Union Oil’s Platform A blowout in Santa Barbara, California of 1969, the wreck of the Exxon Valdez of 1989, and the Deepwater Horizon blowout of 2010. To address these questions, multiple data sources were used to gain an understanding on how key stakeholders framed oil spills and analyze the resulting policy. A conte nt analysis was performed for all three spills on scholarly articles, media articles, after action reports, court records, policy, and policy recommendations. This study also draws on in-depth interviews with key informants that were intimately involved in at least one of the three spills. The study findings suggest that framing does significantly affect the policy that results. In Union Oil's Platform A, the framing was overwhelmingly suggesting that the spill was an environmental and ecological tragedy wh ich could not happen again. The Exxon Valdez is essentially the story of three competing frameworks, eventually giving way to a regulatory framing of the event. The Deepwater Horizon also experienced three competing frames; there was a framing of the event as a slow-onset environmental catastrophe, which coincided with the framing that focused on the economic losses, and eventually the framing of the spill as failure in the regulatory structure. The implications of competing frameworks on policy in these sp ills are also discussed.University of Delaware, Department of Disaster Science and ManagementM.S