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

Transnational Coalitions 43
origin and the use of ideas and issues within an international institutional
setting such as the European Union (Marks et al. 1996, p. 357). Influential
ideas are not necessarily new ideas, and even potentially very powerful ideas
often have to be framed and marketed to potential parties and stakeholders.
Hence, to explain policy development it is necessary to examine both
the input and the uptake of ideas—put differently, the supply of and the
demand for ideas.
It is crucial to translate ideas into concrete policy proposals and coherent
policy projects in order to influence policy. Common policy projects
need to be fine-tuned in order to acquire the necessary political and public
support and at the same time neutralize political opposition. Politicians,
administrative leaders, and international bureaucrats will as individuals in
a transnational entrepreneur coalition ensure that their common policy project
is sufficiently compatible with political, institutional, and economic
opportunities and constraints prevailing nationally and internationally. In
order to transform a somewhat diffuse idea into something sufficiently concrete
and viable, it is necessary that political feasibility be taken into account
properly. 19 Negotiating skills as well as political and administrative experience
are therefore important political resources when policy entrepreneurs
target problems and attune their policy project to a given context.
For ideational scholars, the power or force of ideas depends on the intellectual
as well as the contextual characteristics of ideas (Moore 1990, pp.
78–80). 20 The intellectual characteristics refer to the intellectual content and
structure of an idea; the contextual characteristics refer to the historical and
institutional conditions under which an idea has emerged and could guide
collective action. In their intellectual characteristics, most influential public
ideas are not overly complex or differentiated. 21 As Moore has observed
(ibid., p. 79), “there is no clear separation of ends from means, of diagnosis
from interventions, or assumptions from demonstrated facts, or of blame
from causal effect. All are run together in a simple gestalt that indicates the
nature of the problem, whose fault it is, and how it will be solved.” Similarly,
Wilson (1995, p. 256) has stressed that the power of the ideas that political
elites use to influence policy often “may not be profound or well-thoughtout
ideas . . . their power . . . depends on their being plausible and satisfying
representations of a new way of looking at the world.” The distinctness of
a public idea hinges on its ability to summarize what a particular issue is all
about—or, more precisely, what it is widely perceived to be about.