Who Manages a Spill? Multilevel Collaborative Governance of Offshore Oil Spills in Brazil and the United States

In a federal system, who takes lead when an offshore oil spill occurs? There is a need for multilevel collaborative governance at the local, state, regional, and federal level, and across the public, private, and civic spheres. But such governance is hard to coordinate and harder to maintain. In this paper, we conducted process-tracing for comparative case-study analysis to identify the causal mechanisms that led to inadequate government response to the 2010 Deepwater Horizon and 2019 Northeaster oil spills in the United States and northern Brazil, respectively. We find that while systems may be designed to ensure cooperation, there is often discordance and disagreement in the face of actual environmental problems.