With increasing frequency and growing vehemence, we are being told that on our “only one earth” we are, for the first time, living a single history. By this is meant that technological, ecological, political, economic, and social environments are becoming so globally enmeshed that changes taking place in one segment of international society will have consequential repercussions in all others. An equally frequent and no less vehement remonstration attending this observation is that the scope and complexity of new scientific and technological developments are outpacing the capacities of our systems of international organization to manage them. The necessity has emerged, this line of reasoning continues, to restructure our international institutional frameworks in keeping with the unhitching of nature's constants which science and technology have effected. But on what basis? According to what principles? Toward what ends?

“International safeguards” refer to a set of international agreements establishing control over the production, use, and final disposition of fissionable materials. Before the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) went into effect, International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) safeguards had been applied to 75 reactors and ten other nuclear facilities under 51 different agreements. The design of the first regime was largely a function of political, strategic, and economic rather than technical considerations. After 1971, safeguards were made an integral part of the NPT, and became obligatory with respect to all peaceful nuclear activities in signatory states. Negotiations on the NPT safeguards regime focused on efforts to minimize the major asymmetrical costs that this implied, and particularly to meet the objections of major nonnuclear weapons states. The focus of controversy centered less on resistance to incursions on sovereignty than on demands for equity in incursion. In these negotiations, technological factors facilitated the construction of a politically acceptable regime.

Collective responses to technology-related international problems may differ in terms of organizational outcomes (new, modified, or no organizations). Some of this difference may be accounted for by contrasting objectives and capabilities of major actors. Actors may emphasize different dimensions of the policy setting, possess varying amounts of resources and information to affect that setting, and accordingly prefer alternative responses. Possibilities of this sort are examined empirically in two separate, chronological periods of Western European responses to collective R&D problems. In the first period, major actors stressed different dimensions of the policy setting, possessed unequal resources, and responded to the situation by the creation of new organizations (Euratom and ENEA); in the second, they stressed the same dimensions of the policy setting, possessed roughly equal capabilities, and decidedly resisted the creation of new organizations. The different outcomes suggest that stratification of perceptions and capabilities, emphasizing complementarity, may be more conducive to organizational creativity than similarity of perceptions and capabilities, emphasizing competition.

The question arises whether “technological imperatives” or political considerations will guide the activity and determine the structure of regimes that support the use of technology on an international scale. In the case of communications satellites, the establishment of such a regime involves the search for structures that could satisfy technology and still remain responsive to political forces that desired to affect the decision-making process. The regime which has emerged resulted from the interplay of technology and politics. Initially it consisted of a single global agency, INTELSAT, but as the full potential of the technology became known, a single agency could not provide an adequate forum for the political interests that were associated with each new application that was discovered. Thus, the regime came to consist of a number of related organizations each dedicated to particular uses of the technology.

This study deals with the opening phase of the UN negotiations concerning the future international regime for ocean space. It seeks to establish how the technological and economic capabilities of member nations condition the manner and style of negotiation, the definition of national objectives, and the growth of attitudes and expectations with regard to such a regime. By the end of the 1968–70 period expectations about the future international regime had narrowed noticeably. Yet, for long-range tactical reasons many delegations were still holding out in anticipation of a new Law of the Sea Conference. The original Maltese seabed proposal envisaged a comprehensive international regime. In general, developing countries favored such a solution in the beginning, while industrialized countries preferred an intermediate solution. Eventually the Maltese proposal and the negotiating situation inadvertently set off a wave of claims for various forms of national jurisdiction. This meant that the emphasis at the end was more on the rights of the coastal states and less on the capacity of the world community to deal collectively with the future of ocean space.

With the great spread and intensification of marine fisheries exploitation, the traditional fisheries regime of free and open access (part of traditional “freedom of the seas”) has been modified by many regional or stock-related management arrangements, and is now undergoing drastic change through a radical extension of coastal state jurisdictions. This article deals mostly with the development of various regional and stock-related arrangements. After sketching the overall purposes of management, the aiticle details some of the differences among competing states which have delayed or limited management arrangements, or otherwise complicated their development. Issues of allocation may be uppermost for competing interests, discussed here in the context of shifts from undivided to divided catch limits. The regulatory powers of intergovernmental fisheries commissions have generally been quite limited. While fisheries scientists have in some cases performed vital roles in encouraging regional arrangements, their information and advice has been of limited scope and influence in securing more restrictive regulatory regimes. FAO's Committee on Fisheries (COFI) might be called a global fisheries commission, though much of its most important work has related to amimating and supporting arrangements of a regional character. The radical shift outward of national jurisdictions is rearranging fisheries exploitation in most parts of the world. Given the nature of the resource, however, some forms of regional or stock arrangements will still be needed if the overall purposes of management are to be realized.

The paper examines the role of the world's fishery technocrats and experts in international fisheries management. The system of management provided by the regionally based international fisheries commissions is organized on transgovern-mental and transnational lines. Political delegates to the commissions are usually government technocrats, suggesting that the system is basically transgovernmental. However, the role of scientific advisers to the commissions is studied, since the group may preempt political control through its control on expertise. Results of a questionnaire sent to 900 scientists throughout the world are given, using the data from a structured sample of 84 scientists. Most were found to be trained as natural scientists, and most were employed directly by national governments or through government reseaich institutes. “Elite” scientists in the group, and some executive heads of commissions were also analyzed, and found to have a generally cautious approach to problems of fishery ownership and management. In sum, the transgovernmental system itself was found to allow yet set the limits of transnational role playing by fishery experts.

This article considers how an established international organization with responsibility for programs of pure and applied science adapts its organizational format and purposes to newly defined tasks. It examines the institutional response of IOC (the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission) to the specification of new obligations in the environmental field as stipulated by the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment, and as developed by the Environmental Program that the Conference established. Its main theme is the place of specialized knowledge, and the role of experts at the various stages of policy formation, within national governments and international forums. In analyzing the adaptation of IOC through expert and non-expert activities, our aim is to determine whether new programs and initiatives are fiUed to the existing framework, or produce new structures and institutional arrangements.

In the past few decades we have been improving our understanding of the weather system and exploring ways to modify it. Over sixty countries have experimented with modifying the weather. The new technology of weather and climate modification will raise important political problems which will demand new responses from the international community. Whether states will be able to establish the cooperative measures necessary to develop and manage new technology depends upon whether there are sufficient incentives to do so. This article analyzes the historical patterns of international cooperation in meteorology, and then plots against several time horizons projected developments and capabilities in weather modification technology and the potential problems emerging from using the technology. It derives a tentative picture of the responsibilities demanded, compares the likely responses with those needed, and assesses whether they will be adequate for the problems projected.

This essay seeks to make the following points: (1) The search for holistic intellectual constructs to legitimate the construction of international regulatory regimes is fruitless if it is based on some notion of naturalness suggested by science itself. The purposes to be served by the use and regulation of science and technologies cannot be subordinated to the scientific attributes of the activities to be regulated. (2) Darwinian evolutionary propositions concerning survival imperatives are not adequate guides for the definition of political purposes governing the international regulation of science and technology. (3) If holistic constructs are not fruitful as organizing devices entirely disaggregated and fragmented solutions to technological problems are self-defeating in terms of achieving political purposes. What kind of knowledge do we have to suggest the creation of cognitive links among parts which add up to wholes consistent with political purposes as units-to-be-regulated? The identification of links demands a closer type of cooperation among technical experts and political decision makers than practiced hitherto. Hence a notion of the public interest is advanced to suggest the identification of links through new types of institutions and procedures for combining scientific with political knowledge. (4) Wholes to be identified through such processes can be analyzed in terms of the language of complexity and decomposability, leading to various notions of interdependence. Political purposes and technological developments are discussed jointly to show how a given concern can be characterized by different kinds of interdependencies at different times. “Interdependence” then emerges as a multi-dimensional and dynamic device for identifying wholes. (5) Various types of interdependence are matched to various forms of international organizational cooperation and the evolution of organizations is examined in terms of learning to manage interdependence. (6) By combining organizational forms with changing political purposes we arrive at provisional wholes called “technology-task-environments” which permit the scientist and the politician to contribute jointly to the management of interdependence issues triggered by changing technologies and scientific ideas until the evolving mix of knowledge and purpose leads them to construction of alternative (but equally temporary) wholes.

The inherited international regimes for the ocean, outer space, and the weather-based largely on the principles of open access and free use-are inappropriate to the emerging needs in these realms for efficient and equitable allocation of resources and for conflict management. Neither a substantially greater exercise by national governments of management authority, nor a marginalist approach to increasing the authority of functionally-specific international institutions will suffice. A major commitment to expand and strengthen processes of international accountability among the users of these realms is required. Institutional targets for the mid-1980s should include a comprehensive ocean authority; an outer space projects agency; a global weather and climate organization; and an international scientific commission on global resources and ecologies. Transitional strategies, of a marginal and functionally-specific nature, however, will be required in the meantime, directed toward internationalizing information on the nonterrestrial realms, drawing the relevant actors into consultative arrangements, and limiting current unilateralist trends.

This volume is one by-product of the Travel and Maintenance Program of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, begun in 1969 to stimulate academic interest in the study of international organizations from a variety of perspectives involving new international issues and processes. Growing out of a long-standing Endowment concern with the United Nations and the UN system, the program has sought to create links among the scholarlycommunity in a number of disciplines to develop a focus on changes in the international system that result in apparent shifts in political allegiance away from the territorial state. The program has been supported on a matching basis by the Ford Foundation