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

Explaining Regime Change 163
Scholars have paid special attention to the importance of civil society.
Paul Wapner (1995), who focuses primarily on ENGOs’ involvement in
civil societies and markets, emphasizes that their impact on government
policies is only a minor facet of their political and ideological impact on
global politics. He takes a sociological approach to how ENGOs disseminate
an ecological sensibility, pressure corporations, or empower local
communities, and thereby change world politics. Because he focuses on
extra-state spheres, Wapner makes only implicit claims about state-ENGO
relationships; however, he suggests that ENGOs influence states through
such activities.
Ronnie Lipschutz also emphasizes the importance of global civil society.
He sees Greenpeace as one participant in the networks of global civil society,
and regimes as serving “the specific interests of state and governments”
(Lipschutz 1992, p. 397). Accordingly, ENGOs would play an insignificant
role within the global dumping regime, while states would use the regime
to realize their interests. As chapter 8 demonstrated, however, these propositions
are not supported in the case of the radwaste disposal ban.
Kal Raustiala, who focuses on ENGOs’ participation in international
environmental diplomacy, claims that ENGOs do not supersede states in
international environmental politics. His explanation of how states benefit
from ENGOs’ participation in environmental negotiations and regimes
combines functionalism, neoinstitutionalism, and rationalism. His main
assertions—that “the specific forms of NGO participation granted are systematically
linked to the specialized resources NGOs possess” and that
states gain advantages from NGOs’ participation—create a challenge for
other studies concerned with ENGOs (Raustiala 1997, p. 734). Raustiala
identifies six ways in which ENGOs might assist governments involved in
environmental negotiations and international institutions: policy research,
monitoring of state commitments, “fire alarms,” negotiations reporting,
revealing the “win-set,” and facilitating ratification. He would expect that
states benefited from and controlled ENGOs’ participation when the global
ocean dumping regime changed to emphasize precaution and prevention in
regard to radwaste disposal. But again, these propositions about ENGOs’
participation in international environmental diplomacy are not confirmed
in the case of the global radwaste ban.
In their co-edited volume Environmental NGOs in World Politics,
Thomas Princen and Matthias Finger comprehensively critique realism and