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

Explaining Regime Change 157
adopt a precautionary and pro-environmental international policy on radwaste
disposal in 1983. It is likely that U.S. support would have influenced
the position taken by other pro-dumping governments, and that a sufficiently
large number of governments would have accepted a change to the
annexes. Moreover, if the United States had determinedly supported the
ban, then it might, as in similar international environmental conflicts, have
used sanctions of various sorts to pressure pro-dumping governments to
follow suit. 5
In this case, however, the lack of U.S. leadership did not cause noncooperation
and regime collapse, and the global termination of radwaste
disposal was not a reflection of a change in the underlying distribution of
power among states. This case also disconfirms realists’ claim that powerful
states almost always are able to ignore regimes and can even restructure
regimes if they wish to do so. Powerful states lacked necessary domestic
support to overrule the global ocean dumping regime or to ignore the radwaste
disposal issue. Because realists ignore the domestic level, they cannot
predict which foreign environmental policies governments can pursue
within environmental regimes.
Neoliberals suggest a benign version of the hegemonic stability theory,
according to which declining hegemonic support does not necessarily result
in immediate collapse of a regime. Regimes may persist beyond hegemonic
support, neoliberals claim, if they provide information, lengthen “the
shadow of the future,” and facilitate linkage among issues. But, evidently,
neoliberals would not expect policy development to happen the way it did
in this case. As chapter 8 showed, a transnational coalition used its control
over the forum of the regime to establish international rules which large
pro-dumping states, owing to the development of domestic policies and
protests against radwaste disposal, could not go against. Moreover, it follows
from the assumption about anarchy in the international system (i.e.,
that no central authority exists above states) that monitoring and enforcement
of international agreements is largely left to states or to an international
secretariat. But this was not the case; an ENGO monitored states.
To judge from this case, neoliberals leave out a good part of what environmental
regimes and environmental cooperation is about by assuming
that actors are pursuing only their own interests. Unlike those who stress
that cooperation fundamentally is directed toward a common goal, they
generally downplay the significance of perceived common interests,