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

156 Chapter 9
increasingly became legally controversial. Changes were made with respect
to important regulatory issues, including the burden of proof in regard to
environmental damage, the underlying regulatory approach, and regulation
under conditions of scientific uncertainty. Such a significant legal transformation
affecting the regime’s principles, norms, and rules required a
global regime.
Third, the coalition of anti-dumping governments used the regime to
establish global behavioral norms and standards against which individual
countries’ ocean dumping policies could be compared and judged by other
countries, by ENGOs, and by the public. By setting behavioral norms and
standards, anti-dumping governments used the regime to increase international
political pressure on countries to make their policies environmentally
acceptable. Regime norms and standards significantly raised the
political costs of noncompliance.
Governments had recognized the importance of peer pressure and public
opinion when they equipped the regime with a compliance mechanism
in 1972. They agreed that an amendment of the annexes decided by twothirds
of those members present at a consultative meeting would apply to
all members except those who made an official declaration rejecting it
within 100 days after the decision. In the words of one U.S. negotiator, “it
was felt that the procedure adopted would be useful, in that it requires a
positive act of refusal, theoretically made more difficult by publicity and
peer pressure to accept the proposed amendment” (Leitzell 1973, p. 513).
The U.S. delegation had proposed these rules for changes in the annexes
(memo, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Denmark, December 6, 1972, p. 18). 4
Regime Analysis and the Radwaste Disposal Ban
The three prominent regime approaches propose rather different propositions
about how and why regimes change. Realists expect that the global
dumping regime would depend on continued hegemonic leadership. In their
view, declining U.S. leadership would result in collapse of the regime,
because states would follow their own individual interests. But, as described
in the previous chapter, despite a lack of support by the United States, at
least initially, a significant international policy change with respect to radwaste
disposal was achieved. Realists might argue that the lack of U.S. leadership
explains why the global ocean dumping regime did not resolutely