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

36 Chapter 3
War, Machiavelli’s The Prince, and Hobbes’s Leviathan as their theoretical
ancestors. They share the view that states fundamentally struggle for physical
survival and political independence. Realists emphasize anarchy, states
as the principal actors, and pursuit of power as the primary objective of
states. Realists have contributed substantially to our understanding of
regimes, cooperation, and international leadership. Like many students of
international politics, realists view the prospects for cooperation on environmental
protection with pessimism.
Interest-based or neoliberal hypotheses stress the importance of egoistic
self-interest and rationality in regime formation. 5 Although they accept
basic assumptions of realism, neoliberals claim that states at times succeed
in creating regimes that remedy and prevent the detrimental effects of their
uncoordinated behavior. According to interest-based propositions, regimes
regularize interactions among states, and under certain conditions regimes
can overcome collective action problems that hinder cooperation among
states. Neoliberals emphasize the importance of integrative bargaining and
leadership by individuals. Comparison of interest-based and power-based
approaches is possible in this case because prominent individuals and specialized
United Nations agencies were closely involved in the construction
of the global ocean dumping regime.
Peter Haas’s Saving the Mediterranean, a study of the Mediterranean
Action Plan (“Med Plan”) to protect against marine pollution in the
Mediterranean basin, has drawn attention to the question of how an epistemic
community—“a network of professionals with recognized expertise
and competence in a particular domain and an authoritative claim to
policy-relevant knowledge within that domain or issue-area” (Haas 1992a,
p. 3)—might induce states to cooperate. As already mentioned, epistemiccommunity
theorists primarily focus on how scientists and technical
experts influence international politics. Their research program has initially
focused on compliance with regimes rather than regime creation. The
concept of epistemic community originated in the reflective literature that
asserts that cooperation fundamentally varies with the evolution and
change in governments’ perception of cooperation. 6 Epistemic-community
analysts view the prospects of cooperation on environmental protection
with moderate optimism. 7 Haas’s conclusion that the Med Plan was instituted
and advanced by an epistemic community radically challenges both
power-based and interest-based regime analysis. Because the global ocean