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

174 Chapter 10
government negotiations. Neoliberal propositions pay little attention to
communicative forms of leadership, to public diplomacy, or to the mobilization
of world public opinion. Bargaining is of course important, but it
takes place only when the issue has been constructed.
Despite useful insights in the regime literature concerned with scientific
and technical knowledge, its emphasis on consensual knowledge created
too narrow a view of the potential political influence of environmentalists
and scientists. This case showed that backing by a sympathetic public opinion
was at least as significant for influential policy entrepreneurship by
prominent environmentalists and scientists as whether they could conclusively
prove that a serious environmental problem really existed. In spite of
scientific uncertainty and dispute, distinguished environmentalists and scientists
initiated and framed political debate and motivated policy makers
to launch new policy initiatives. But knowledge-based analysis ascribed little
importance to ideas-based actors others than epistemic communities and
knowledge brokers. Furthermore, as political legitimacy and public support
for policy were ignored, little attention was paid to public opinion. In
view of the emphasis put on ideas and perception in knowledge-based
analysis, these are significant shortcomings. It is unfortunate, though not
entirely surprising, that reflectivists and epistemic-community theorists
largely overlooked how persuasion and communicative action influenced
regime processes in this case. This study showed that attracting the attention
of international mass media and, in turn, mobilizing and shaping
national and international public opinion was a crucial element of the strategy
to influence global environmental policy pursued by U.S. legislators,
the Stockholm secretariat, and a global ENGO.
In summary, since they overlook some of the significant actors and
processes, power-based, interest-based, and knowledge-based regime
analyses could neither singularly nor in some combination account adequately
for regime formation in this case. These three approaches exhibit
some significant similarities and common weaknesses. They pay little
attention to widely accepted ideas and policy entrepreneurship, and the
opinion of the public—in other words, the attitude of the ultimate stakeholder—is
generally ignored in mainstream regime approaches. Only few
contributors to regime analysis give much weight to the creation of legitimacy,
to the justification of policy, or to the mobilization of public support.
The approach concerned with transnational coalitions of policy