Enhancing Coordination for Effective Management of Oil Spill Pollution in South Africa

Although multi-sectoral coordination in disaster risk management has been progressing in South Africa for over two decades, there has been limited commitment to an integrated regime in managing marine oil spill incidents. Poor incident management persists despite the availability of data, protocols, legislation, and resources housed in different government and private sector entities. This study identified practices that enhance a coordination process for the effective management of oil spill pollution. A grounded theory approach is applied to the coordination issue, which is characterized by an interactive process of simultaneously considering theoretical grounding during our empirical research. Empirical evidence includes observations of 47 meetings and three oil spill exercises with 79 delegates from 32 different organizations, which supports the coordination process of instituting a national Incident Management System for marine oil spills in South Africa. An additional 44 individual open-ended questionnaires supplement this earlier body of evidence for data triangulation and validation. Analysis of development of the Incident Management System process revealed that, when designing a novel long-term project that is reliant on a shared vision from multiple organizations, enhanced coordination and collaboration for successful implementation is dependent on the following practices: (1) obtaining political commitment, (2) bridging knowledge gaps, and (3) sharing resources.