Vested experts: Knowledge, power, and the politics of protecting the ozone layer

The dissertation's central hypothesis is that actors within and outside of the state influence policy through the provision of information and interpretation, and that this influence owes to particular characteristics of the actors and the information they have. While there has been significant research into the power of ideas in shaping policy outcomes, we have no theoretical approach for understanding differences in the power of actors to shape how policy issues are understood. To address this gap, the dissertation develops a conceptual framework for knowledge-based power built on four hypotheses: (1) The greater an actor's knowledge-producing resources, the greater the actor's opportunity to define policy issues involving scientific and technical information; (2) The greater an actor's reputation for experience, the more likely their interpretation will be trusted by policymakers; (3) The authority of an actor will be greater if the actor's values are consistent with those of policymakers; (4) The higher the barriers to acquisition of relevant information held by actors, the greater will be their influence over issue definition. These barriers may be imposed by ownership, the level of specialization required, or economic cost.; The dissertation explores these hypotheses in a plausibility probe of the influence of corporations on perceptions of the stratospheric ozone issue. I begin by identifying the potential sources of industry's knowledge-based power relative to other actors, and then trace the processes that produced U.S. policy positions and international decisions on ozone regulations, including those of the 1985 Vienna Convention for Protection of the Ozone Layer, the 1987 Montreal Protocol, and amendments negotiated during the 1990s.; The study's major finding is that every international agreement on ozone protection in some way bears the mark of industry influence, in large part because corporations controlled economic and technical information needed to evaluate the problem and responses to it. The significant knowledge-generating resources and market reputation of the major chemical companies, together with the high value placed by governments on technical fixes to ozone depletion, further enhanced industry's knowledge-based power and helped sustain its influence on the ozone regime over time.