D.G. Webster is an associate professor in the Environmental Studies Department at Dartmouth. Her research focuses on the precursors to governance, or the processes that social systems have to go through to be ready to design and implement effective environmental policies. She is author of two books, multiple peer reviewed articles, and a number of successful interdisciplinary research proposals. She also serves as editor of the journal Global Environmental Politics and contributes to her field through service to the Environmental Studies Section of the International Studies Association and the Ocean Taskforce of the Earth Systems Governance Project.
Dr. Webster’s first book, Adaptive Governance: The Dynamics of Atlantic Tuna Management (2009) posited and tested her vulnerability response framework. It won the International Studies Association’s Harold and Margaret Sprout Award in 2010. Her second book, Beyond the Tragedy in Global Fisheries (2015), explains the evolution of global fisheries governance through a responsive governance lens, showing how fisheries all over the world cycle through periods of effective and ineffective governance in what she calls the management treadmill. She is currently working on her third single-author book, Precursors to Governance: Reconciling the Environment and Social Justice and a multi-author graduate-level text titled The Governance Treadmill. Both books will extend her research on responsive governance to non-fisheries contexts.
In balance with her independent work, Dr. Webster actively pursues interdisciplinary research projects to develop new methods for understanding social ecological systems. The first of these, Fishscape: Modeling the Complex Dynamics of the Fishery for Tropical Tunas in the Eastern Pacific Ocean, wrapped up successfully in the fall of 2016 (NSF CNH#1010280; Webster was lead-PI). The second, a SESYNC Pursuit project titled Subjective vs Objective Risk in the Provision of Aquatic Ecosystem Services, brought interdisciplinary scholars together to improve our understanding of water quality governance in Lakes Erie and Chaplain. It concluded in the spring of 2019. She is currently a PI on a third NSF-funded project, Modeling the dynamics of human and estuarine systems with regulatory feedbacks (CNH2-L # 2009248), which uses computational modeling to improve our understanding of water quality management in the Chesapeake Bay Watershed. Her next big interdisciplinary project is the creation of an institutional diagnostics toolkit, as proposed in a paper on the panacea mindset that was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2018. Information on other lab projects can be found here.
Dr. Webster teaches courses related to global environmental governance, green business, marine policy, and environmental economics. She earned her PhD from the University of Southern California’s Political Economy and Public Policy program in 2005.
The lab is not currently accepting graduate students but there are multiple opportunities for undergraduate research assistants through Dartmouth’s UGAR programs.