Expectations play a central role in understanding scientific and technological changes. Future-oriented representations are also central with regard to nanotechnologies as they can guide policy activities, provide structures and legitimation, attract different interests, focus policy-makers’ attention and foster investments for research. However, the emphasis on future scenarios tends to underrate the complexity of the challenges of the present market of nanotechnologies by flattening them under the needs and promises of scientific research. This is particularly apparent if we consider the viewpoint (...) of the regulator who faces two different ranges of problems with regard to the market and research and is expected, simultaneously, to manage two different types of regulatory instruments, pursuing at the same time the same goals. Instead, by favoring only the future scenarios, the regulator runs the risk of abruptly shifting from more flexible and elastic tools to forms of hard legislation, wasting, thus, the resources of the soft-regulation, in particular those of self-regulation. By referring primarily to the European context, human rights, also thanks to their normative structure of principles, can help in strengthening both the legislation needed for regulating the present market and the soft instruments needed for steering research and for fostering the stakeholders’ participation without sacrificing the coherence of the regulatory response. (shrink)

Among the various experiments in ‘new governance’, the model of Responsible Research and Innovation is emerging in the European landscape as quite promising. Up to now, there have been two versions of RRI: a socio-empirical version which tends to underline the role of democratic processes aimed at identifying values on which governance needs to be anchored and a normative version which stresses the role of EU goals as ‘normative anchor points’ of both governance strategies and policy making. Both versions are (...) unsatisfactory. The first since it suggests movable anchorage which could clash with prefixed values, such as individual rights. The second since it does not safeguard fundamental rights in the process of balancing ‘anchor points’. This result is counterintuitive because it exposes governance to the risk of facing adverse court decisions in the defense of individual rights, thus losing its anticipative attitude. In order to avoid this outcome, the paper argues that it is only through better integration between the system of human rights and that of EU fundamental rights that the anticipative feature of RRI can be preserved. (shrink)

The regulation of innovation reflects a specific imaginary of the role of governance that makes it external to the field it governs. It is argued that this decision and rule-based view of regulation is insufficient to deal with the inescapable uncertainties that are produced by innovation. In particular, relying on risk-based knowledge as the basis of regulation fails to deal sufficiently both with the problem that innovation ensures the future will not resemble the past, and with the problem that the (...) social priorities that underlie innovation often remain unquestioned. Recently, rights-based frameworks have been defended as principle-based approaches to innovation governance that address the gaps which trouble an understanding of regulation as guided by risk-based decision procedures. An alternative view of governance is defended, based on a concept of care drawn from feminist ethics and other traditions. Care aims, not at justifying punctual decisions, but at transforming institutions and practices, with the goal of creating specific institutional ‘virtues’, and requires the broad and deep participation of publics in shaping innovation. In this way, governance is made internal to innovation. (shrink)