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

48 Chapter 3
change. For instance, the regimes that have been established for the allocation
of the radio spectrum and international telecommunications “have
reflected the relative power of states and have changed as the distribution
of power has changed” (Krasner 1991, p. 363). For realists, a decline of
American leadership would weaken the global ocean dumping regime, and
a fragmentation of hegemonic power would eventually mean regime collapse.
In the absence of a hegemon, disputes would become more likely and
rule violations more frequent within this environmental regime.
In view of their claim that states are “the only agents capable of acting
to solve global problems,” realists would expect nonstate actors—in this
case, international organizations, ocean scientists, ENGOs, and prominent
individuals—to be largely insignificant in the process of building and changing
the global ocean dumping regime (Waltz 1986, p. 108). Moreover, realists
implicitly state that the influence of nonstate actors diminishes as the
number of involved states rises.
Interest-Based Regime Analysis and the Global Ocean Dumping Regime
Scholars stressing the importance of interests fundamentally share power
theorists’ view of the international system and regard regimes as “largely
based on self-interest” (Keohane 1984, p. 57). However, neoliberals find
that international rules and institutions facilitating cooperation are more
widespread than what realists suggest. Interest-based hypotheses emphasize
the significance of collective goods, collective action problems, mixed
motives, joint and mutual gains, and plus-sum conflicts in international politics.
37 For this group of scholars, the international political system is divided
up into issue areas, and states are not quite the rational, unitary decision
makers power theorists would have them to be. 38 To explain interstate cooperation,
neoliberals focus on regimes. They agree with the view that “actors
are rarely constrained by international principles, norms, rules, or decisionmaking
procedures”—in other words, regimes really do not matter much
on their own—but they believe nonetheless that regimes, by performing a
number of functions, facilitate cooperation (Krasner 1985, p. 60).
Neoliberals claim that regimes, under some conditions, help governments
overcome collective action problems, especially the problems of supplying
and maintaining collective goods—for example, pollution-free oceans. The
Prisoners’ Dilemma illustrates that governments behaving as rational ego-