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

110 Chapter 7
It is useful in a heuristic sense to demonstrate that the prominent
approaches to regime analysis, either singly or in some combination, do not
account well for the how the global dumping regime was built. But disproving
existing theories does not necessarily prove that a different type of
regime dynamics exists. Power-based, interest-based, and knowledge-based
theories might not account for this particular case, but does that necessarily
mean that a qualitatively different type of regime dynamics exists? In
this chapter I present more evidence supporting the propositions about the
influence of public ideas and transnational coalitions of policy entrepreneurs
I developed in chapter 3. Although only a single case study, the analysis
is useful in order to detail and carefully explore various kinds of
interactions between ideas and policy entrepreneurs and thus to “stimulate
the imagination toward discerning important general problems and possible
theoretical solutions” (Eckstein 1975, p. 104) in studies of regime formation.
I also expect the findings to be relevant to comparable issue areas,
and the identified causal relationships to operate in those issue areas.
Knowledge-Based Regime Analysis
The knowledge-based regime approach focuses primarily on how policy
changes in response to cognitive and perceptive changes among governmental
policy makers. In the environmental field, scholars favoring this
approach have focused mostly on the role of scientists and epistemic communities
in spreading and communicating new ideas to policy makers. Peter
Haas (1992a, p. 27) has argued that epistemic communities are “channels
through which new ideas circulate from societies to governments as well as
from country to country.”
In the case of the global ocean dumping regime, reflectivists would correctly
predict that a change in perception of the health of the oceans preceded
global regulation and institution building. As the previous chapters
showed, a change in perception did take place: the oceans, previously perceived
as robust and perhaps even indestructible, were in the early 1970s
perceived as being vulnerable, fragile, and endangered. To be sure, global
regulation would not have been established had this change in perception
not occurred.
It is equally apparent, however, that this new perception of the vulnerability
of the oceans was not an accomplishment of a group of ecology-