Science, politics and institutional design

At the 1993 joint meeting of the Oslo and Paris Commissions for the prevention of marine pollution in the North-East Atlantic, a reorganization of the Commission's scientific and technical advisory groups was decided upon. Addressing the background for this reorganization and the general functioning of the PARCON scientific-political complex so far, this article concludes that the PARCON organizational approach, with a strong national/administrative flavour in the scientific/technical work, has seemingly functioned quite well so far. But the closer cooperation with the more "independent" ICES signalled in the reorganization may also be interpreted as an awareness of the fundamental legitimacy problems related to such an "administrative" science-politics model.