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

Notes to pp. 43–46 203
19. On political feasibility, see, e.g., Majone 1975 and Underdal 1991.
20. Litfin (1994, p. 30) similarly posits that the influence of a trans-scientific discourse,
in addition to the authority of its agents, depends upon the “contextual and
substantive constitution of discourse.”
21. As an example of cognitive studies underscoring the need for simplicity, see
Odell 1982, p. 68.
22. For similar propositions regarding policy makers selecting among economic
ideas, see Woods 1995, pp. 172–173.
23. On “the ozone hole,” see Litfin 1994. On the slogan “Save the whales,” see
Andresen 1989. Similar to his fellow biologists, the internationally renowned scientist
Edward O. Wilson used the term biological diversity before the issue became
a prominent international issue in the late 1980s. But a few staff members of the
U.S. National Academy of Science persuaded him to use the term biodiversity in the
campaign for preservation of biological diversity because the term is “simpler and
more distinctive . . . so the public will remember it more easily.” The issue soon
attracted increasing international attention, and a treaty, the Convention on
Biological Diversity, was signed by more than 150 governments in Rio de Janeiro
in June of 1992. “The subject,” wrote Wilson (1994, pp. 359–360), “surely needs
all the attention we can attract to it, and as quickly as possible.” The metaphor of
the Earth as a spaceship on which humanity travels, dependent upon its vulnerable
supplies of air and soil, first appeared in a speech given by the U.S. ambassador to
the United Nations before the UN Economic and Social Council in 1965. The
prominent economist and ecologist Barbara Ward had drafted this speech, and she
used Spaceship Earth as the title of a book published in 1966.
24. See, e.g., Conlan et al. 1995, p. 135.
25. Jönsson (1993, pp. 209–213) discusses how metaphors might influence the perception,
choices, and strategies of decision makers involved in regime creation, but
not their effects on the public.
26. Goldstein (1993, pp. 12, 255–256) underlines that ideas need to fit with underlying
ideas and social values in order to gain support among political entrepreneurs
and the attentive public. On the notion of the fit of ideas, see Yee 1996, pp. 90–92.
In a similar way, the norms-oriented literature stresses adjacency, precedent, and fit
between new and old norms. See, e.g., Finnemore and Sikkink 1998, p. 908.
Jacobsen (1995, p. 304) stresses the importance of ideas’ satisfying minimum societal
standards of distributive fairness.
27. For a similar conclusion in the context of intergovernmental negotiations, see
Garrett and Weingast 1993, p. 186.
28. Scharpf 1997 (pp. 130–135) also emphasizes the role of “arguing” in increasing
aggregate welfare through joint problem solving. For a recent analysis of the
role of argument and persuasion in international relations, see Risse 2000.
29. Waltz concludes, in a note, that “states [in such situations] face a ‘prisoners’
dilemma,’” and that “if each of two parties follows his own interest, both end up
worse off than if each acted to achieve joint interests” (1986, p. 129).
30. On the tragedy of the commons, see Ostrom 1990, pp. 2–3.