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

44 Chapter 3
It seems quite plausible, then, that it is not clear reasoning, but simple
images, illustrative pictures, analogies, and even anecdotes that make public
ideas powerful and influential. They make it possible for transnational
entrepreneurs to draw attention to complex environmental issues and,
equally important, to make sense of them in the public arena. It should therefore
be expected that policy entrepreneurs especially search for and select
those ideas that can effectively be expressed in metaphoric or symbolic
forms. It follows that the ideas and problems that appeal most to policy
entrepreneurs—in effect, the ideas and problems that policy entrepreneurs
tend to select and push—are those that can be broken down into and communicated
as simple and intuitively appealing metaphors, images, and symbols.
22 “The ozone hole,” “Save the whales,” “biodiversity,” and “spaceship
Earth” are some of the prominent examples of such environmental ideas
and metaphors. 23 Nonenvironmental examples of policy entrepreneurs’ converting
complex concepts into powerful populist themes and ideas also
exist. 24 For these scholars, metaphors, images, and pictures that can grab the
public imagination are of utmost importance in public communication and
societal dissemination of ideas. 25
In regard to contextual characteristics, an idea, if it is to be influential,
must resonate with historical experiences and must have a clear link to a
currently pressing problem. As I have noted, policy entrepreneurs are most
influential when they succeed in coupling their ideas and proposals to
urgent problems; rarely do they have any control over the stream of problems,
and seldom are they able to provoke a crisis that makes decision makers
search urgently for policy solutions (Polsby 1984, p. 169). Scholars have
similarly found that the persuasiveness of economic ideas is determined as
much by current economic and political circumstances as by the structure
of the ideas themselves (Hall 1989, p. 370). And historical studies of regulation
also confirm the significance of the historical context for the power
of ideas (McCraw 1984, p. 304). In summary, ideas must be fitted to existing
intellectual and contextual circumstances in order to gain influence over
policy. 26
Apart from the intellectual and contextual circumstances, under what conditions
should ideas and transnational entrepreneur coalitions be expected
to have significant influence over regimes? This is an important question for
the study of these transnational coalitions as well as any other ideas-based
actor. Importantly, some ideas may raise serious distributive issues at the