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

Transnational Coalitions 49
ists might fail to cooperate. Neoliberals find that regimes can improve on
this socially undesirable situation. To show how, they incorporate insights
from rational choice theory and microeconomics into interest-based regime
analysis. They claim that as improving communication between the prisoners
increases cooperation in the Prisoners’ Dilemma (where the prisoners
are held incommunicado), so improving communication among
governments will aid cooperation. Communication is therefore crucial in
coordinating the preferences of governments.
It has been demonstrated experimentally that cooperation is more likely
when the Prisoners’ Dilemma is played several times instead of just once
because short-term gains obtained by noncooperation are outweighed by
the potential benefits of cooperation in the long run (Keohane 1984, pp.
75–76). 39 In a similar fashion, neoliberals maintain that examples from
international political economy support their claim that cooperation
becomes more likely when governments expect that their relationships will
continue indefinitely (“the shadow of the future”) and retaliation is possible
(Axelrod and Keohane 1986, pp. 232–234). 40 Regularizing inter-governmental
relations is therefore a major function of regimes.
Neoliberals moreover argue that regimes can facilitate monitoring and
enforcement by providing information on the behavior of states. Regimes
will thus help in establishing the credibility of governments, especially their
reputation for cooperation. Axelrod and Keohane (ibid., p. 237) summarize:
“Regimes provide information about actors’ compliance; they facilitate the
development and maintenance of reputations; they can be incorporated into
actors’ rules of thumb for responding to others’ actions; and they may even
apportion responsibility for decentralized enforcement of rules.” By stressing
reciprocity among states, regimes delegitimize defection, which makes
this strategy more costly (ibid., p. 250). For neoliberals, regimes thus serve
a major function as gatherers and distributors of information.
Neoliberals stress that transaction and information costs rise as the number
of states increases. They agree that in some cases very high transaction
costs and information costs might preclude cooperation. Another threat to
cooperation within groups involving large numbers of states stems from
difficulties in anticipating the behavior of other states. In addition, the feasibility
of sanctioning defectors is diminished in large groups, a fact that
encourages free riding (Oye 1986, pp. 19–20). To improve on such situations,
neoliberals point to the beneficial effect of transforming groups