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Do regimes matter? Epistemic communities and Mediterranean pollution control

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 May 2009

Peter M. Haas
Peter M. Haas
Affiliation:
Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
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Abstract

International regimes have received increasing attention in the literature on international relations. However, little attention has been systematically paid to how compliance with them has been achieved. An analysis of the Mediterranean Action Plan, a coordinated effort to protect the Mediterranean Sea from pollution, shows that this regime actually served to empower a group of experts (members of an epistemic community), who were then able to redirect their governments toward the pursuit of new objectives. Acting in an effective transnational coalition, these new actors contributed to the development of convergent state policies in compliance with the regime and were also effective in promoting stronger and broader rules for pollution control. This suggests that in addition to providing a form of order in an anarchic international political system, regimes may also contribute to governmental learning and influence patterns of behavior by empowering new groups who are able to direct their governments toward new ends.

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Articles
Information
International Organization , Volume 43 , Issue 3 , Summer 1989 , pp. 377 - 403
Copyright
Copyright © The IO Foundation 1989

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References

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39. FAO internal memo, “Report on Travel to Algeria and Tunisia to Advise Algerian Authorities on Marine Pollution Problems and to Visit the UNDP/SF Fishery Survey and Development Project TUN 33,” FAO FIRM/TRAM/672, 05 1972, pp. 3–4Google Scholar; and FAO, “Fisheries Travel Report and Aide Memoire,” no. 672, 05 1972, p. 4Google Scholar. A UNDP consultant observed that “harbors are evil smelling places, in some places with gas and oil bubbling to the surface.”

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51. See Keohane, After Hegemony, chap. 6; and Keohane, Robert O. and Axelrod, Robert, “Achieving Cooperation Under Anarchy: Strategies and Institutions,” in Oye, Kenneth A., ed., Cooperation Under Anarchy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1986), pp. 226–51Google Scholar. Robert Jervis uses this approach to explain the persistence of the Concert of Europe as well. See Jervis, Robert, “Security Regimes,” in Krasner, , International Regimes, pp. 173–94Google Scholar.

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53. In this case, the epistemic community had to actively defend itself from groups within the U.S. administration who opposed stringent controls on chlorofluorocarbons. The epistemic community only prevailed four months before the final adoption of the treaty, after four months of internal policy review by the domestic policy council. See Doniger, David. “Politics of the Ozone Layer,” Issues in Science and Technology 4 (Spring 1988), pp. 86–92Google Scholar; and Peter M. Haas, “Ozone Alone, No Chlorofluorocarbons: Epistemic Communities and the Protection of Stratospheric Ozone,” paper presented at the 1988 annual meeting of the American Political Science Association. The most recent measures introducing the Montreal ozone protocol into U.S. policy are discussed in Federal Register 53 (12 08 1988), pp. 30566–619Google Scholar.

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55. Ecologists lack access to decision-making channels in the U.S. government. Proposals for a bilateral treaty by Environmental Protection Agency Administrator William Ruckelshaus in 1983 were ignored by the White House. See Rosenbaum, Walter A., Environmental Politics and Policy (Washington, D.C.: CQ Press, 1985), pp. 307–8Google Scholar.

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