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

Explaining Regime Formation 121
tries’ expectations converging in the ocean dumping issue area. The coalition
constructed an issue area where none had existed.
As the next section further documents, the Stockholm secretariat was an
important policy entrepreneur and had considerable ideational influence
on regime formation. The Stockholm secretariat was at the same time a
mobilizer, a popularizer, and a legitimizer. But because interest-based theory
focuses narrowly on bargaining, negotiators, and directly involved participants,
it largely ignores leadership premised upon widely shared values,
beliefs, and public perceptions. It overlooks the fact that transnational policy
entrepreneurs under certain circumstances are able to shape and mobilize
public opinion and to influence governments’ beliefs, values, and
interests, and the fact that negotiators respond to such changes. 15
Similar to regime approaches emphasizing power and knowledge, the
interest-based approach cannot explain why states redefined their interests
with respect to the oceans in the early 1970s, or that a new perception of
the impaired health of the oceans emerged at that time. And because this
approach is concerned mostly with interstate interactions, it is less helpful
in understanding the interactions between domestic and international factors
in regime formation, most importantly the U.S. initiative to establish
the regime and the U.S. leadership strategy emphasizing communication
and international persuasion. 16 It is insufficient, finally, to point to protection
of self-interest as the primary or perhaps the only motivation behind
the creation of this global environmental regime. 17
Policy Entrepreneurs and Public Ideas: The Essential Ingredients
First of all, a group of U.S. legislators were determined to “clean up the
oceans” despite conflicting expert advice. As was described in chapters 4
and 5, they were not pressured and persuaded by an epistemic community.
These policy entrepreneurs allied themselves with prominent scientists and
leaders of the environmental movement in order to mobilize and frame public
and political opinion and to establish regulation of ocean dumping. They
used congressional hearings, the media, and environmental leaders to communicate
new ideas. They did not follow public opinion; they led it.
I chapter 5 I quoted from Senator Ernest Hollings’s closing remarks at
the International Conference on Ocean Pollution: “. . . the only way . . . we
are ever going to get this message through is with people with the brilliance