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

120 Chapter 7
with the interest-based approach, as it pays considerable attention to international
organizations and transnational coalitions. It also introduces more
actors into the process through which states’ interests are defined than do
knowledge-based and power-based approaches.
Some neoliberals have paid much attention to individual representatives
of international organizations acting as leaders when regimes are built. This
is indeed pertinent, since the Stockholm secretariat was deeply involved at
several important stages of the regime-building process and played a crucial
role in moving governments toward agreement. As was detailed in
chapter 6, policy entrepreneurs within the secretariat developed and promoted
solutions that removed significant obstacles to a successful completion
of the negotiations. Thus, this case evidently supports the claim that
entrepreneurial activities are necessary for a regime to form. But policy
entrepreneurs also provided a substantial measure of ideational leadership
and mobilized international public and political support over the entire
process of regime establishment; indeed, ideational power was not confined
to the problem-definition and pre-negotiation stages. Taken together, these
activities—raising issues, brokering among stakeholders, and mobilizing
and broadening support—seem better understood as manifestations of policy
entrepreneurship as defined in chapter 3. Young’s propositions about
structural, entrepreneurial, and intellectual leadership neglect other, equally
important facets of policy entrepreneurship that were influential in this case.
Whereas the case disproves Young’s strong hypothesis that the presence and
interplay of at least two of the three forms of leadership is necessary
(although not sufficient) for a regime to arise, it supports Underdal’s propositions
about a possible “optimal mix” of leadership modes in multilateral
negotiations. 13
It has recently been argued that ideas and focal points around which the
behavior of actors converges under certain circumstances facilitate cooperation
among self-interested actors. Crucially, as Garrett and Weingast
emphasize (1993, p. 176), focal points are not automatically given; they
must be constructed. 14 But rational choice theory cannot predict why a certain
idea is selected over others. This is instead a question for an ideational
approach to political analysis. Environmental problems and international
issue areas are human artifacts, so perceptions often vary over time and
across actors. Only after sustained efforts of persuading, selling, and campaigning
by a transnational coalition of policy entrepreneurs were coun-