Elsevier

Marine Policy

Volume 30, Issue 5, September 2006, Pages 496-509
Marine Policy

Lessons in precaution: The International Whaling Commission experience with precautionary management

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.marpol.2005.06.015Get rights and content

Abstract

The precautionary principle (PP) only represents a new approach to managing uncertainty in so far that it requires proponents of an activity or substance to provide evidence that the activity/substance is harmless, as opposed to the more traditional “trial and error” approach that has instead placed the burden of proof that something is harmful on its opponents. This article critiques the PP as a policy making tool for managing uncertainty, focusing on the epistemological problems it raises, before then using the International Whaling Commission's experience with precautionary approaches to wildlife management to demonstrate the principle's limits and weaknesses when applied in a highly politicised policymaking environment. The article concludes that while the PP offers some benefits for managing uncertainty, its vagueness and openness to broad interpretation can also result in its application creating, rather than limiting, risks and uncertainty.

Introduction

The precautionary principle (PP) has attracted considerable attention from academics and policy makers, who are divided by controversy over how the PP might be applied to particular environmental problems. But while a large body of work providing critiques and commentaries on the PP as an approach to environmental policy making has emerged over recent years, there remains little detailed discussion of its impact on the International Whaling Commission (IWC) and what the IWC's experience can tell us about the principle's role and limits in environmental management.

In short, the emergence of the PP in the IWC during the early 1970s was positive in that it contributed to the commission finally producing a serious attempt to better account for uncertainty issues, following the moratorium on commercial whaling's adoption in 1982, through the Comprehensive Assessment of whale stocks. This initiative later led to the creation of the highly risk-averse revised management procedure (RMP)—an algorithm designed to establish what, if any, catches could “safely” be taken from a given stock1—which was provisionally accepted by the IWC in 1994 after having been rejected by some members the previous year.

Until the early 1990s, when determined attempts by some in the commission to derail the RMP's future implementation began in earnest, it seemed likely that the pay-off from the Comprehensive Assessment would be the commission finally establishing a broadly acceptable balance somewhere between its previous management extremes (i.e., unsustainable commercial hunting in the 1950s and 1960s versus no commercial hunting under the 1982 moratorium). The realisation of this elusive balance, however, so far has been prevented by the serious disagreement that surfaced along with the RMP in the early 1990s over whether the IWC's goal was in fact to manage uncertainty issues with both the interests of commercial whalers and the future survival of whale stocks in mind.

By 1993, when a majority of members rejected the Scientific Committee's unanimous advice to adopt the RMP, it became clear that a growing number of influential IWC governments were now opposing any return to commercial whaling—regardless of the scientific advice on offer2—while others were being increasingly perceived by pro-whaling governments and groups to be making demands for unjustified levels of precaution. This division over goals and acceptable levels of risk has persisted, in spite of the commission's adoption of the RMP, and is now delaying agreement on the revised management scheme (RMS), which provides the inspection and verification rules under which the RMP must operate. The continuing dearth of compromise over the level of precaution the RMS should provide for has meant that hunting has continued, both commercially and for research purposes, outside of the international management controls the IWC is supposed to provide, thereby making the IWC largely redundant as a wildlife management organization. Furthermore, the ongoing impasse may well result in the whaling nations eventually leaving the commission, as Japan is now threatening to do, to whale under regional organisations—a move that effectively would eliminate any further prospect for global regulation of commercial whaling.

What role then has the PP played in the IWC since its first invocation more than three decades ago? As I will argue in this paper, rather than having led to better management of the world's whale stocks, it instead has been instrumental in creating a political deadlock that continues to undermine any real chance of whales being globally managed. But one should not “throw the baby out with the bathwater” by only blaming the PP, and the so-called precautionary approaches to management it has been used to justify, for the IWC's ongoing problems and concluding that it, therefore, has no place in policy making.

The principle's main problem is that it is vague and open to broad interpretation; the IWC's ongoing impasse, however, is not simply the result of the principle's amorphous character. The willingness shown by various governments in the IWC to selectively interpret and apply the principle in ways that complement and support predetermined political objectives—vis-à-vis their equally selective interpretations and treatment of scientific uncertainty—is what has most undermined compromise and negotiation in the commission. Indeed, the ambiguous and obscure nature of the PP certainly provides ample opportunities for stalling, equivocation, and political posturing, but ultimately it is the policy makers themselves who choose whether to do so.

Thus, the three key issues raised by the IWC experience that I will focus on in this paper are (a) the PPs openness to a wide range of interpretations that allow it to be selectively invoked by policy makers to emphasise uncertainty issues when scientific advice clashes with non-negotiable policy positions/goals; thereby leading to (b) its potential for eroding, rather than enhancing, prospects for co-operation on management initiatives when applied in highly politicised environments like that of the IWC; and, therefore, (c) the need for broad agreement within the relevant regime on basic management objectives and levels of acceptable risk (i.e., a politically acceptable balance between exploitation and conservation priorities) before the PP can be successfully applied as a management tool rather than a political weapon.

Section snippets

Precaution: how much, when, and at what cost?

The PP certainly is not a new idea and has been in use, in various guises, for some time. Describing the PP as “merely old wine in a new green bottle”, Chase [1] argues that the precautionary concept has been around much longer than its popularly cited debut, during the mid-1970s, in German environmental law as Vorsorgeprinzip (the foresight principle). Indeed, when looked at as essentially a recasting of familiar proverbs such as “look before you leap” and “an ounce of prevention is worth a

Interpreting uncertainty: the IWC's change of focus

The IWC's adoption of a moratorium on commercial whaling in 1982 was a major turning point in the commission's treatment of scientific uncertainty. By adopting the moratorium, the commission, for the first time in its history, was interpreting and using scientific uncertainty as a basis for ceasing all commercial whaling. The IWC's adoption of the moratorium also effectively established the PP as its guiding principle in policy making—a sea change in IWC direction that helped set the stage for

Precaution equals protection?

By the close of 1972, the IWC was operating in an entirely different environment. Of the five Antarctic nations that had largely dictated IWC policy throughout the 1950s and much of the 1960s, only the Soviet Union and Japan continued Antarctic hunting into the 1970s era. Pelagic whaling was no longer of any interest to the three former Antarctic whaling nations—Norway, the UK and the Netherlands—nor to anyone else in the commission bar the Japanese and Soviets. The Netherlands, following New

Enter the moratorium: the politics of precaution

By 1974, environmental problems and threats had become issues of broad public concern in a number of the IWC's member countries, in particular the US, thereby creating the risk of significant political and economic backlash if governments and companies chose to ignore the groundswell of public opinion being generated by an increasingly influential environmental NGO lobby. With political pressure for greater stock protection mounting as criticism of the uncertainties in the Scientific

Conclusion

The ongoing debate over how the PP should manage scientific uncertainty, beyond simply banning all whaling indefinitely, is rooted primarily in its ambiguous nature and in the fundamentally different political positions of the pro- and anti-whaling protagonists. As a basis for policy, the PP is extremely general and provides little in the way of guidance in determining when and how much precaution is required,17

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