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

Explaining Regime Formation 111
oriented epistemic scientists persuading and pressuring governmental decision
makers in a number of counties to act against ocean dumping. The
global ocean dumping regime was created not in response to significant
improvements in scientific knowledge of the damaging effects of ocean
dumping on the marine environment but in response to the powerful idea
of “dying oceans” and to new environmental values and beliefs. Scientific
uncertainty prevailed in regard to the environmental effects of ocean
dumping.
In chapter 4 I noted that members of the U.S. Congress were given conflicting
scientific advice in the early 1970s. Congressional hearings revealed
deep disagreements between one group of experts, who denied that waste
disposal represented a serious danger, and another group (mostly ecologists
and marine biologists), who asserted that the limited assimilative capacity
of the oceans should be protected by international regulation. Domestic
ocean dumping regulation was not, therefore, established by policy makers
responding to persuasion and pressures from a unified epistemic community.
Moreover, this case confirms neither the notion of epistemic influence
and its emphasis on consensual knowledge nor the implicit assumption that
within each single policy area or issue area one unified epistemic community
advises and influences decision makers. Surprisingly, the epistemiccommunity
literature has often ignored that scientific communities and
experts might be offering conflicting advice to policy makers. 1 Therefore,
the literature does not throw light on the selection or rejection of policy
ideas in situations where scientists disagree.
The politics of expert advice is not well captured by knowledge-based
theory either. Two groups of experts competed for policy influence. By powerfully
communicating their advice and ideas to the public and to decision
makers, environmentalists and “visible scientists” effectively neutralized
the policy advice of disagreeing scientists. 2
Testimony given before a congressional hearing in 1972 illustrates the
dominance of the pro-environmental viewpoint. Before explaining his
view of the ocean dumping problem to the congressional committee, a
marine geologist, who was opposed to a complete ban on ocean dumping,
said: “I fully recognize that this approach, as in my statement here, favors
ocean disposal of all of certain types of wastes may seem contrary to
everything you have heard or read regarding waste disposal at sea.”
(Smith, “Statement,” in U.S. Senate, Ocean Waste Disposal, p. 206) This