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

42 Chapter 3
order to pave the way for major policy innovations. As Kingdon (1984, p.
134) has observed, “entrepreneurs attempt to ‘soften up’ both policy communities,
which tend to be inertia-bound and resistant to major changes,
and larger publics, getting them used to new ideas and building acceptance
for their proposals. Then when a short-run opportunity to push their proposals
comes, the way has been paved, the important people softened up.”
Policy entrepreneurs therefore persistently push ideas and proposals in
order to acquire influence over policy.
One way in which policy entrepreneurs support, strengthen, and protect
an idea is by spreading it; another is by attacking competing or rival ideas.
Evidently there is interplay between these two strategies, since entrepreneur
coalitions by effectively spreading and consolidating their ideas reduce the
opportunity for rival ideas to define policy problems. Indeed, as Moore has
observed (1990, p. 73), “dominant ideas have certainly relegated competing
definitions of the problem to relative obscurity.” Moreover, a more direct,
deliberate strategy of policy entrepreneurs inside governments and government
agencies is simply to reduce the dissemination of competing ideas and
solutions—thus attempting to monopolize the supply of ideas and solutions—by
preventing rivals from participating in the making of policy. For
instance, they may exclude rivals as witnesses at hearings and public meetings,
as members of advisory groups, or as authors of policy reports.
Transnational entrepreneur coalitions function as selection, framing, and
dissemination mechanisms for ideas. Many sources of ideas exist. Individual
policy entrepreneurs may occasionally single-handedly produce powerful
ideas. 17 At other times, experts and analysts supply ideas that become influential.
Networks of specialists—such as issue networks, policy communities,
and policy subsystems—generate and debate ideas and policy
proposals. 18 By generating the ideas and proposals from among which decision
makers choose, they influence the development of domestic and international
policies.
Though it might still be somewhat unclear where individual ideas come
from, the crucial issue is whether an idea receives sufficient support, not
who or what originally produced it. Indeed, Kingdon (1984, p. 76) asserts
that “ideas come from anywhere, actually, and the critical factor that
explains the prominence of an item on the agenda is not its source, but
instead the climate in government or the receptivity to ideas of a given type,
regardless of source.” It is likewise important to distinguish between the