Current Projects

The Oceans Governance Toolkit (OGT) was proposed initially in Young, Webster, et al. (2018) as a tool to help decision-makers and stakeholders overcome the panacea mindset and implement holistic solutions to the complex problems of oceans governance. Initial workshops to develop the toolkit were held in California (2019), Australia (2019), and Japan (2020) but travel restrictions associated with the Covid-19 pandemic prevented further development. In 2024, Dr. Webster received a Distinguished Fulbright Scholar Award in Oceans Governance to resume this work with colleagues at the University of Sao Paulo in Brazil. She will be traveling to the region to co-develop a prototype OGT for Marine Plastic Pollution. It will be a searchable interface that allows users to easily identify the pros and cons of different governance approaches. As we develop the toolkit, we will be assessing the effectiveness of different policy architectures and researching the factors that make governance advice persuasive, particularly when effective measures are be politically difficult.

Small coastal port south of Tokyo, Japan. During our initial workshops and interviews for the Oceans Governance Toolkit, we found that the decision makers and stakeholders who chose to engage with us usually had sufficient understanding to design comprehensive policies but that they lacked the necessary political support or governmental resources to implement these plans. Numerous participants indicated that the toolkit would be most useful if it could provide information that would be persuasive to their superiors, the public, or resource users. (c) D.G. Webster 2020

Chesapeake Governance Project This project reconstructs the history of the Chesapeake Bay Program, which is the central governance mechanism for improving water quality in the Chesapeake Bay. We are particularly interested in how precursors to governance affected the evolution of water quality governance in the watershed and so have collected a sample of related news coverage as well as state and federal laws affecting nutrient pollution in the region. Dr. Webster also interviewed many of the decision makers who are currently involved in watershed governance (click here for a report on her findings). Data from these sources will be used to help design and test a computational model of the Chesapeake governance process as part of a larger project, CNH2-L: Modeling the dynamics of human and estuarine systems with regulatory feedbacks (NSF Award#: 2009248).

The Conowingo Dam plays an important role in nutrient management for the Chesapeake Bay. For many years, it has reduced the flow of nutrients into the Bay but now it is at capacity and remediation is needed to prevent major influxes of nutrients into the Bay during extreme weather events. Since the nutrients stored behind the dam came from Pennsylvania, it has also become part of the political blame game that stymies progress on water quality improvements in the region. (c) D.G. Webster 2022.

Media Coverage of Climate Related Extreme Events (a.k.a., the Media Project) There are many scholars studying the impact of climate related extreme events on social-ecological systems. This project adds to that literature through the creation of a database describing news coverage of extreme events. The database is designed to expand in a modular fashion, with each module comprised of data on news stories about a specific type of event in a specific geographic location. The first module to be completed focuses on harmful algal blooms in the Chesapeake Bay Watershed (complimenting the Chesapeake Governance Project), but we plan to extend the database to cover other issues including coral bleaching, hurricanes, etc. Through this design we should be able to compare coverage across issues and geographies.

The Great Barrier Reef has experienced a severe coral bleaching event almost every year since 2016. This section of reef is partially bleached, and many of the dead coral are now covered with algae. In our surveys and interviews we found that bleaching motivated a small section of the population but that neither bleaching nor cyclones altered people’s willingness to engage in political actions to support climate change mitigation. (c) D.G. Webster 2017

In her third book project, Precursors to Governance, Dr. Webster explores how changes in the distribution of resources, understandings, and incentives alter the potential for effective environmental problem solving. She first develops a detailed classification system synthesizing knowledge about precursors to governance from multiple literatures. Next, she uses the governance treadmill described in her second book, Beyond the Tragedy, to demonstrate how different patterns of governance can emerge as those precursors are altered by endogenous and exogenous forces. She then explores these theoretical advances in three case studies: uranium mining in Namibia, fisheries and slavery in Thailand, and water quality governance in the Chesapeake Bay watershed in the United States. Though widely varied, these cases all show when marginalized populations who are negatively impacted by environmental degradation organize to demand change. However, a single environmental issue is rarely sufficient; rather substantive improvements occur when multiple social, environmental, and public health issues converge to create wide windows of opportunity for change.

Operational in 1976, Rössings was the first uranium mine to open in Namibia. Due to combined international and domestic pressures the company developed some of the most advanced environmental and labor practices in the uranium industry in the 1980s, but progress slowed after Namibia’s independence from South Africa in 1990. (c) D.G. Webster 2023

Find out more about past projects on our archived projects page.