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

112 Chapter 7
illustrates well that a community of professional waste managers and its
supporters had been unable to successfully challenge claims made by more
publicly visible and vocal scientists and ecologists.
The anti-dumping view dominated and was advocated by policy entrepreneurs
in government and backed by ecologists and environmentalists
influencing the public and the government though the mass media. As will
be elaborated below, the idea that “the ocean is dying” came to be seen as
being morally superior to all other views, and this further increased its influence
and reduced the influence of disagreeing scientists. But Peter Haas and
his colleagues tend to overlook that epistemic communities need to make
convincing arguments that appeal to decision makers as well as to the public
in order to influence policy. It is necessary to compare epistemic communities’
influence with the influence of policy entrepreneurs and other
ideas-based actors, including the role of the media. Moreover, these environmental
regimes analysts mostly ignore national and transnational policy
entrepreneurs and claim that it is predominantly scientists who place
environmental issues on the public agenda. 3 Yet scientific and epistemic
communities are clearly not the only channels through which new beliefs,
ideas, and knowledge about the state of the environment circulate from
societies to governments and among countries. A more satisfactory knowledge-based
approach would have to identify with more precision the nature
of processes determining the selection of ideas and the conditions under
which epistemic communities affect policy. 4
Peter Haas concludes in his analysis of the Med Plan that a shared, or at
least nonrival, perception of the environmental problem among developing
and developed countries facilitated the establishment of a regime.
However, as was demonstrated in chapter 6, the global ocean dumping
regime was successfully built despite the fact that relatively few developed
countries saw ocean dumping as a significant international problem, while
developing countries generally thought that developed countries had created
the problem and that they therefore should solve it. As will be further
documented below, policy entrepreneurs inside the Stockholm secretariat,
not a transnational network of scientists, helped governments overcome
serious obstacles to regime establishment in the absence of a shared perception
of the environmental problem with which they were dealing.
The swiftness of this regime-formation process should be noted. 5 It could
explain the relative insignificance of scientists and experts as well as the