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

Explaining Regime Change 167
company DuPont opposed regulating CFCs as this would hurt the company
economically, but DuPont later urged regulation as this would serve
its long-term economic interests. 23 Generally, different distributions of losers
and winners create different opportunities for building and sustaining
national and transnational coalitions.
Third, ENGOs influence regime development by monitoring environmental
commitments of states. For example, in the case of the endangered
species trade regime (CITES), the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) has
conducted monitoring and some degree of enforcement (Princen et al. 1994,
pp. 217–236). 24 ENGOs are an important part of environmental governance
on an international scale, and as possessors of local knowledge they
provide governments with useful information. One Norwegian politician
said the following about Bellona (an ENGO monitoring the nuclear waste
situation in the northwestern part of Russia): “Bellona is a supplement and
has shown that a voluntary organization enters environments and gets
information not available to a public authority. For this reason, I believe in
continuing the cooperation between private and public organizations.”
(Mathismoen 1994; translation by L. Ringius) ENGOs also generate information
on compliance and noncompliance, which they use to great effect,
and ENGO monitoring may compel states to revise their policies. For example,
ENGO monitoring in the Antarctic was followed by protests that pressured
the French government to shelve its plans to build an airstrip (Laws
1990, pp. 121–149).
The radwaste disposal ban demonstrates that monitoring by ENGOs
is significant and that ENGOs generate information on compliance and
noncompliance, which they use to great effect in global environmental
politics. As discussed above, other studies also ascribe importance to
ENGO monitoring. The issue deserves to be examined more fully, and it
could become apparent that this source of influence depends on combinations
of the specific nature of individual environmental issues and
ENGOs. ENGOs’ monitoring capability should be expected to be highly
dependent on their organizational resources. Also, the scope of environmental
problems may facilitate or reduce monitoring by ENGOs. For
example, as early as the 1920s experts considered it very difficult to detect
oil slicks and to link them with the responsible tanker (Mitchell 1994, p.
446). It is also evident that obstructing and boycotting states’ environmental
policies is not always possible. For example, Norwegians generally