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

Conclusion 183
likely to be influential. I have also suggested a number of propositions about
why one set of ideas had more force than another in a given situation, and
in what way particular ideas were influential. These propositions are concerned
with the intellectual and contextual characteristics and structure of
ideas. They differ conceptually from the neoliberal analysis of problem
structure, which does not consider the degree to which certain ideas,
because they can easily be communicated to the general public and to policy
makers, lend themselves favorably to communicative action and therefore
are taken up by policy entrepreneurs and used in mobilizing parties
and stakeholders.
As was pointed out in chapter 1, the ideational approach to political
analysis has recently become increasingly prominent in studies in comparative
politics and international relations, and significant improvements have
been made in understanding the role of ideas in policy development. But,
despite these improvements, the independent impact of ideas is not always
clearly documented in this literature. Rather than analyzing ideas in the
abstract, it seems necessary that ideational studies better combine and link
together ideas and actors. To further improve the ideational approach, it
will be important to address more fundamental issues, particularly the following:
What makes ideas significant? In what ways do ideas matter? And
how are significant ideas transmitted or diffused?
To judge from this case, a combination of interest-based regime analysis
and ideational analysis seems the most promising research strategy for
future regime studies, at least for environmental policy and natural
resources management studies. But it would be important to broaden the
narrow focus on policy elites and government actors in regime studies.
Regime scholars with a rationalistic bent mostly ignore mobilization of
political and public support, justification of policy, and creation of political
legitimacy in regime processes. Much research has focused on strategic
action, instrumental bargaining, and rationalistic elements of elite behavior,
and it would be useful to carefully examine the influence of widely
accepted ideas and common interests.
It is misleading to consider narrow self-interest to be the only motivating
force in international environmental politics. This study demonstrated the
political weight of concerns for the public interest in policy initiation and
regime development. Similarly, the importance of collective interests of
states should be acknowledged. The interests of states are often at the same