Paper long abstract:

In today's national R&D and innovation policies in many European countries, one main challenge is the question of how to define them in the context of demand towards the increasingly participatory and inclusive democratic governance of complex matters of the new emerging technologies. Traditional decisionist models (it is assumed that the exclusive responsibility should be in the hands of politicans) as well as technocratic models (it is assumed that policy decisions should be taken by experts and supported mainly or solely by bureaucrats) are now widely seen as obsolete approaches. There is need to establish new forms of cooperation and communication, in which ordinary citizens and a wide variety of stakeholders Will participate by creation of common technological strategies and models of technological governance. This demand is put foreward especially in the case of synthetic biology. Synthetic biology does represent a new technology for which is characteristic the following ambiguity: to radically change or not to change its policy regimes? Namely, in its case, there are exchanging two discourses, i.e. »everything is new« and »everthing is the same«. How to deal with this dilemmas in small states which are armed with limited formal mechanisms for coordinating the interests of different social actors? The results of empirical research performed in the beginning of 2014 (interviews, quantitative data analysis) will be used to highlight this issue in Slovenia as a case of small state.