831 



Scheinman REFLECTIONS ON PAST EXPERIENCE 



Organization (ELDO), European Space Research Or- 

 ganization (ESRO), and European Space Agency 

 (ESA)l, and energy [e.g., CERN, Euratom, European 

 Nuclear Energy Agency (ENEA), and Solvent Refined 

 Coal project (SRC-II)). Cooperative ventures have in- 

 creased most rapidly and dramatically in the energy 

 sector in the wake of the 1973 oil crisis and the en- 

 suing search for alternative sources of energy supply. 

 Although the 1973 crisis was a stimulus to augmented 

 international cooperation, a record of cooperative 

 activities was already firmly established in the Tield of 

 nuclear energy, dating to the mid-1950s with the U.S. 

 "Atoms for Peace" program and the subsequent crea- 

 tion of Euratom and the Organization for Economic 

 Cooperation and Development's (OECD's) ENEA. The 

 nuclear experience offered lessons and some alterna- 

 tive models for cross-national cooperation, several of 

 which were reflected in later international ventures. 



The mechanisms through which cooperation has 

 been effected include bilateral, multilateral, and inter- 

 national arrangements.' The record appears to indi- 

 cate a preference among technologically advanced 

 countries for bilateralism especially where something 

 more than exchange of information and personnel is 

 involved, while multilateral arrangements seem to fit 

 more easily with agreements emphasizing information 

 exchange. Decisions on the mechanisms for coopera- 

 tion are of course subject to political considerations 

 that may dictate different outcomes than otherwise 

 might result. 



The International Energy Agency (lEA), created 

 in response to the 1973 energy crisis, adopted an 

 organizational mechanism for R&D that falls between 

 bilateralism and multilateralism and parenthetically 

 reinforced the principle of national sovereignty 

 against the development of a strong centralized inter- 

 national institution. The mechanism is the assignment 

 of principal management responsibility for a specific 

 research activity to a lead country or agency that has 

 a major interest and commitment in the research area. 

 On the one hand, this approach provides tlexibility in 



the selection of key participants and in helping to 

 ensure some equivalence between costs and benefits 

 and avoiding the free rider problem that has con- 

 cerned technologically advanced states anxious to 

 preserve their technological knowledge and to share 

 or exchange it only on equitable terms. On the other 

 hand, it risks excluding technologically weaker states 

 who, having only a limited or even no program in the 

 technological area under investigation, are unable to 

 bring some equity to the table. 



In effect, this approach, which with some varia- 

 tion also has been used in the North Atlantic Treaty 

 Organization, Committee on the Challenges of Mod- 

 em Society (NATO-CCMS) and in several ENEA 

 projects (Halden, Dragon) may be more properly seen 

 as a form of extended bilateralism. Indeed, several 

 key projects that go significantly beyond information 

 exchange are essentially bilateral or trilateral agree- 

 ments among technologically advanced states and 

 really could have been developed quite apart from the 

 lEA framework. This is true of two coal technology 

 agreements on gasification and hydrogeneration in- 

 volving only the United States and the Federal Re- 

 public of Germany (ERG) and of a trilateral coal 

 agreement on fluidized bed combustion involving the 

 United States, the FRG, and the United Kingdom.^ 

 For the United States, at least before 1973, coopera- 

 tion tended to be primarily in the nuclear area, pri- 

 marily bilateral, and largely limited to information 

 exchange. For international cooperation at large, the 

 emphasis on passive, information exchange tended to 

 dominate. And where it was exceeded (e.g., Euratom, 

 Concorde, ELDO) the record reveals difficulty. 



Some of the propensities noted above-bilateral- 

 ism or, in the case of lEA. extended bilateralism-and 

 the limited extent of hardware-oriented joint tech- 

 nology development efforts are reflected in the 

 following tables drawn from two studies on U.S. en- 

 ergy R&D cooperative programs in the OECD-related 

 context. Table I displays the scope and pattern of 

 cooperation in 1973, Table II provides similar data 



TABLE 1 

 U.S. -OECD Cooperative Energy R&D Programs in Late 1973 



NUCLEAR TECHNOLOGY/FUSION VOL. 2 JULY 1982 



