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

54 Chapter 3
advocate policies only when the policies conform to their causal and principled
beliefs. Moreover, epistemic communities are actively formulating
and influencing policy; they are not just government advisors, policy specialists,
or experts.
According to knowledge-based analysis, knowledge is transformed into
policy through a piecemeal, gradual process (ibid., p. 369). But it is difficult
to pin down exactly when knowledge is consensual enough for policymaking
purposes, and it therefore becomes difficult for the reflective scholar
to predict at what point new knowledge will give rise to regimes. 55 Nonetheless,
negotiations usually deal with topics on which there is an accepted
pool of knowledge (ibid., p. 370). It should therefore be expected that the
global ocean dumping regime and global radwaste disposal policy reflect
consensual or nearly consensual knowledge.
To illustrate his thesis, Haas has often referred to ocean affairs. Pointing
to marine protection as an example of a significant conceptual change, he
writes that “the ocean matters to governments because their citizens use it
to fish, sail ships, extract oil, fight wars, and conduct research; they also
now recognize that the oceans help determine the weather and that it may
not be a good idea to use them as the world’s garbage dump” (ibid., p. 365).
Haas does not explain, however, how and why the health of the oceans and
competing uses of the oceans became significant political issues. As we shall
see, both issues signify a change in perception that gained political momentum
only in the early 1970s. Thus, the reflective approach often has an evolutionary
and rather harmonious flavor. As my study shows, it tends to
downplay ideological conflicts and rivalries among competing perceptions.
When studying environmental regimes, scholars stressing the importance
of cognitive factors focus mostly on scientific and technical knowledge
and on how expert advice is organized and institutionalized. Peter
Haas (1990b, p. 350) argues that an ecological epistemic community—
which shared views on “the kinds of substances to be controlled, the methods
to be used and the values to be employed in order to direct policy
towards desired ends”—has been influential in promoting the arrangement
for protecting the Mediterranean Sea against pollution. This ecological
epistemic community defined the scope and influenced the strength of the
Med Plan. Based on a shared broad understanding of the environmental
problems and their solutions, an ecological epistemic community pressured
decision makers to construct a regional arrangement the community itself