This dissertation examines and compares how the United States and Australia have addressed one of the significant new challenges in marine conservation and resource management-biological invasions mediated by the ballast water of commercial shipping. It uses the comparative setting to engage both practical questions of policy and regulatory design for bioinvasions prevention and theoretical questions of science-policy dynamics, the management of scientific uncertainty in environmental decisionmaking, and the relationships between policy process and policy outcomes.
The study finds that while sharing very similar experiences with ballast-mediated marine invasions and working with the same scientific understanding of the problem, the two countries have nonetheless adopted different policy definitions and regulatory responses to what are the same in nature, scale and dynamics ecological risks, with Australia's response reflecting a higher level of invasion risk acceptance.
The main argument of this study is that key differences in U.S. and Australian ballast policy and regulation can be traced to the very different roles played by aquatic and marine scientists within each country's policy process. The different roles and influence of U.S. and Australian scientists are in turn traceable to the different ways in which scientific input was structured in each country's policy process, and so the different opportunities for scientists' policy participation.
Within the open and pluralistic U.S. policy process, a group of primarily academic scientists became a formative influence behind the development and implementation of a precautionary national strategy to managing the invasion risks from ballast. Highly proactive, these scientists not only communicated the nature and extent of ecological understanding, but also insisted on the policy implications and directives to be derived from this understanding and confronted anti-regulatory claims and agendas pursued by shipping industry.
In contrast, within the closed, corporatists Australian policy process, the decision to trade a considerable measure of risk reduction for an expected measure of regulatory relief for shipping was ultimately the result of negotiation between government and industry, with a selected group of primarily government scientists brought in to enable the practical implementation of the policy consensus established through this government-industry consultation, rather than stepping in to guide policy thinking or shape regulatory action.
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