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

Explaining Regime Formation 129
input of scientists. This case shows no evidence that networks of scientists
exerted a strong influence on the framing of the issue of ocean dumping or
on the formation of a regime. This case shows that the hegemon, using persuasion
rather than force and coercion, provided leadership. The interestbased
analysis accounts well for the entrepreneurial leadership provided by
Maurice Strong and his secretariat, but it overlooks the influence of
ideational factors in environmental policy initiation and regime formation.
Chapter 3 showed that power-based, interest-based, and knowledgebased
regime analyses disagree on a number of theoretically significant
issues. In addition to those differences, the dominant regime theories have
some significant similarities and shared weaknesses.
First, there is widespread agreement that public opinion—hardly mentioned
in the literature on regimes—has little or no effect on cooperation for
the protection of global commons such as the oceans.
Second, all three approaches largely exclude the domestic level from their
analysis of regime formation. As my study has repeatedly demonstrated,
examination at domestic levels is necessary in order to understand the origins
of the global ocean dumping regime. It is also evident that scientists
are just one among many groups potentially influencing domestic policy
development.
Third, regime analysis views international organizations, especially when
understood as policy entrepreneurs in their own right, as rather insignificant.
The epistemic-community approach tends to erase the boundaries
between national and international bureaucracies, although it is open to
the possibility that an international secretariat might use scientific knowledge
to persuade countries and to facilitate negotiation among governments,
and furthermore pays attention to bureaucratic power of epistemic
communities. The interest-based theory is primarily concerned with how
individuals associated with an international organization might use their
negotiating skills productively to build regimes. Such approaches ignore
other, equally important facets of policy entrepreneurship and the weight
of public opinion and international moral pressure.
The United States’ leadership in the formation of the regime was
ideational in nature. It was not based on coercive measures or on manipulation
of incentives. A series of U.S.-sponsored international conferences at
which prominent international environmentalists and scientists vividly