Responsible research and innovation between "New Governance" and fundamental rights

The chapter first examines the diffusion of soft regulation as an answer to the uncertainty affecting science, technology and innovation, which is addressed by leveraging the knowledge pool possessed by the regulatees and by integrating the divergence of values and interests through cooperation and flexibility. After presenting some examples of soft regulatory initiatives from nanotechnologies, the chapter frames these regulatory developments in the context of the New Governance approach. A second part of the chapter briefly presents RRI in the broader context of the evolution of responsibility paradigms. By referring to their characterization in terms of time orientation (prospective, retrospective) and active/passive attitude to responsibility, three paradigms (fault, risk and precaution) are distinguished. Then, RRI is presented as a proactive, participative, multidimensional approach to responsibility in the governance of STI that is founded on the mutual commitments of societal actors, thus constituting a distinct paradigm on its own. Drawing on these remarks, the meaning and relevance of fundamental rights in RRI is assessed. Far from being a constraint on innovation and on the public debate of its trajectories, fundamental rights are viewed as a catalyst of normative orientation and public participation. The conclusions observe how the reference to fundamental rights makes RRI a more comprehensive approach when compared with New Governance, as it internalizes the problem of the normative anchoring of decisions and of the consistency among different kinds of normative elements. Eventually, it is noticed that the potential of fundamental rights to successfully combine normative orientation with openness and flexibility in RRI is conditioned by the capacity to design a governance framework that can ensure the complementarity between hard and soft regulation, legal norms and voluntary commitments.