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

Explaining Regime Formation 113
demand for leadership by skillful policy entrepreneurs in this case. 6 Less
than 2 years elapsed between when the United States first defined ocean
dumping as an area that would benefit from cooperation and when the
global ocean dumping regime became a reality. Presumably, no priority was
given to development of a scientific basis for ocean dumping policy because
it was widely perceived that this problem was relatively urgent and significant.
Developing a scientific basis for decision making would have delayed
the policy-making process and was neither necessary nor sufficient in order
to push the regime-formation process forward. In the Med Plan case, in
contrast, it took much longer to build the regime and, because more weight
was put on marshaling scientific evidence, networks of scientists were better
positioned to play a significant policy role.
Ernst Haas (1990, p. 226) has suggested that the leadership style of
Maurice Strong was based on using a “privileged body” of scientific and
technical knowledge to persuade governments. Strong and his staff did
indeed perform crucial policy entrepreneurship in the formation of the
global ocean dumping regime and in the time of the Stockholm conference.
Significantly, the secretariat was well informed about states’ interests and
positions with respect to ocean dumping, and it could therefore design and
propose regime features that helped states overcome significant obstacles to
cooperation. As is true of the domestic policy process in the United States,
persuasion through use of exceptional scientific documentation of environmental
damage was not an essential facet of the entrepreneurship of
Strong and the Stockholm secretariat.
In summary, knowledge-based hypotheses about formation of environmental
regimes do not explain this case well. Despite presenting a case study
that is comparable to the Med Plan and other epistemic community-oriented
case studies, this study of the influence of marine scientists on the regimebuilding
process does not confirm key knowledge-based propositions.
Power-Based Regime Analysis
Realists would assume that the United States, the hegemon, would build
the global ocean dumping regime to protect its national interests. They
would stress, quite correctly, that the global ocean dumping regime was an
expansion of U.S. domestic regulation onto the global level. This group of
scholars would further point out that, since the regime potentially would