Radioactive Waste Disposal at Sea: Public Ideas ... - IMO

88 Chapter 6
inside the Stockholm secretariat played an important catalytic and facilitative
role in the pre-negotiation and negotiation stages of regime formation.
The secretariat was actively involved in framing and communicating
ocean pollution as an urgent global policy problem. Serious tensions
between developed and developing countries, major differences in states’
commitment to protecting the environment, and lack of global attention
to ocean dumping jeopardized the construction of the regime. Differences
in domestic policies and national positions and their possible international
implications clearly manifested themselves over the course of the negotiations.
However, largely through the policy entrepreneurship of the Stockholm
secretariat, these obstacles were overcome. As this chapter will also
document, international pressure was a significant element in reaching
agreement on the regime. As chapter 7 will demonstrate, the secretariat
effectively mobilized international public opinion and pressure during the
preparations for the Stockholm conference.
The Stockholm Conference and Ocean Pollution from Dumping
The idea to convene a high-level United Nations conference in order to focus
the attention of the international community on the need for international
action on the environment originated with Sverker Aström, head of Sweden’s
mission to the United Nations. A member of the Swedish delegation made
the formal proposal at a meeting of the UN’s Economic and Social Council
in July of 1968. The council’s resolution calling for the conference was then
debated by the UN General Assembly. The assembly adopted the draft document
without alteration in December of 1968. Under the resolution, the
coming United Nations conference was to “provide a framework for comprehensive
consideration within the United Nations of the problems of the
human environment in order to focus the attention of Governments and
public opinion on the importance and urgency of this question and also to
identify those aspects of it that can only, or at best be solved through international
cooperation and agreement” (UN General Assembly Resolution
2398 (XXIII), December 3, 1968, quoted in Caldwell 1984, p. 44).
Michel Batisse, the organizer of the UNESCO Biosphere Conference in
1968, appointed a Swiss scientist, Jean Mussard, as Secretary-General of
the coming conference. Mussard planned to organize an international meeting
that would focus on scientific aspects of the environment. Political and