Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
community. He suggests that many studies focused on regime negotiations
and their creation but few attempts have been made to investigate their
real and practical signii cance and their direct impact on the behaviour of
actors (states). He proposes that MAP derives its ef ectiveness from the
inl uence of 'epistemic communities'. He considers it a success because it
'altered the balance of power within the Mediterranean governments by
empowering a group of experts who then contributed to the development
of convergent state policies in compliance with the regime' (Haas, 1989,
p. 377). He concludes that MAP may signal the emergence of an entirely
new international political order for the environment and he stresses the
role of 'epistemic communities' in promoting stronger national pollu-
tion controls (Haas, 1990). Nevertheless, more than 15 years after Haas's
study, this enthusiasm is missing from other researchers of MAP.
Skjaerseth (1996, 2002) also studied MAP but he was not convinced
about its success. He notes that the reasons for signing up to the Barcelona
Convention did not always have much to do with environmental concern.
For the less developed countries it was an opportunity to receive training
and equipment for monitoring pollution, since the i nancial burden, at
least until 1979, was carried by UNEP. Also it was a diplomatic opportu-
nity to establish political/diplomatic ties between countries traditionally
in conl ict. Therefore the states probably had mixed motives that were not
necessarily entirely environmental. Moreover, the Barcelona Convention
goals were vague, and even though a main goal of MAP in its second
phase was to produce specii c targets with specii c deadlines for the Parties
to the Convention, it failed to do so. In addition, the states have not been
very willing to provide adequate reporting on the national implementa-
tion of their commitments. Therefore, due to the lack of clear targets and
the inadequate state reporting, it is dii cult to estimate whether there has
been behavioural change among target groups. Skjaerseth also considers
the MAP budget to be very limited compared with the wide scope of its
demands. It is even more dii cult to assess the impact of MAP on the state
of the marine environment since there is a lack of reliable and continu-
ous pollution and water quality data. It has to be noted though that the
collection of these scarce data is largely a result of MAP's establishment.
However, even if there is an improvement in the marine environment it
is rather dii cult to attribute it all to the regime, since other factors such
as general socioeconomic and technological change or natural environ-
mental variation have to be taken into account. Moreover, for many
countries, much environmental national legislation was also required by
other organizations such as the European Union. Skjaerseth concludes
that MAP is considered a collaborative political success since it produced
a complete plan for de-polluting the Mediterranean Sea and furthermore
