THE Austrian Science and Research liaison office (ASO) was established in Sofia in 1994 to intensify scientific contacts between Austria and Bulgaria and initiate scientific co-operation.

It is operated on behalf of the Austrian federal ministry of education, science and culture (bm:bwk) and has been co-ordinated by the Centre for Social Innovation (zsi) since March 2004. Felix Gajdusek has been the head of the ASO since October 2002.

The ASO intensifies contacts between Austria and Bulgaria through activities like workshops, conferences and meetings, which include Austrian and Bulgarian participants, says Gajdusek. They try to identify the best fields for events to take place, and do a lot of "organisational mappings" to get a broader overview of existing structures, with the idea of integrating all the actors useful to the development of a theme. This year they are preparing a conference in Bulgaria on December 2, the working title of which is Linking University Research and Entrepreneurship: New Social Roles for Universities in South East Europe. This will contribute to the discussion concerning applied research, universities and business start-up centres situated at universities. It will address the question: what are the new social roles of a university in the 21st century? Speakers and participants from all countries in South East Europe (SEE) are being invited to present their experiences, with a focus on "hands on" knowledge.

The rationale for the conference states that universities are being confronted with changing framework conditions and new social demand. Therefore, the self-understanding of universities is under discussion and the institutional fabric of university structures is under pressure to change and to adapt. It outlines specific conditions in Europe, such as the Lisbon targets to make Europe the most competitive knowledge-based economy of the world, which put pressure on universities to enhance their ability to develop new activities in addition to well established educational programmes; and highlights the demand for the development and improvement of university-business linkages and of university-labour market linkages.

The conference aims to discuss "new role perceptions of universities with a special focus on South East Europe". It will also address the fact that "in addition to the new challenges, the South Eastern European universities are facing a number of inherited internal systemic structural deficiencies connected with economic shortfalls which affect the whole research and innovation system negatively," stating that "research activities are under-financed, research programmes very often below any critical mass and corporate and international funding opportunities insufficiently known and addressed. Special attention will be directed towards the exchange of creative approaches to develop new university functions despite difficult framework conditions."

The event promises to be the next in a string of successful conferences that the ASO has been involved in. Gujdusek says that last year the ASO held a "very fruitful" conference that targeted the issue of Women in Science and Research. Almost 80 people took part and most SEE countries were represented. Another successful conference on the Evaluation Practice of Research Organisations also took place last year. This year a workshop on Communication Culture Research Organisations, is being prepared together with the Centre for Advanced Study, Sofia (www.cas.bg) and the Union of Scientists, Bulgaria.

As well as organising conferences and workshops, the ASO also promotes a `bottom up' approach for strengthening ties in the scientific community through active networking. This consists, for example, of financing travel and activities integrating Austrian and Bulgarian scientists. In this way they try to establish new connections and to integrate networks in the region by identifying topics relevant for development- bearing in mind that the links between research and development are strongly connected, but that the bigger links between all sectors in SEE are missing. Between 2002 and 2003 the ASO financed and organised about 160 activities which were all 100 per cent bilateral.

The ASO also provides information about Austrian scholarships. For 2005/2006 the ASO have financed about 146 months -10 per cent of the Austrian grants available worldwide - for PhD students from Bulgaria. The students spend up to nine months in Austria and then finish their PhD in Bulgaria. This provides the opportunity to establish new networks and to come into contact with appropriate practise in their scientific field. Overall, says Gajdusek, the ASO's aim is not to attract researchers to work in Austria or to find jobs for scientists in Austria, as far as Bulgaria is one of the countries worst affected by Brain Drain - the migration of highly qualified people out of the country.

The subject of Brain Drain is being addressed by a project that has recently received funding through the ASO. The project, entitled: Catching up Societies in Transition: Female Highly-Skilled Migration and Youth Drain from South East Europe to Austria in the Context of EU Enlargement, was one of 40 proposals received in response to call from the ASO Ljubljana and Sofia for proposals for research co-operation and networking between Austria and South East Europe. The co-operations were targeted towards the ASO countries Slovenia and Bulgaria and SEE (Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Romania, Serbia and Montenegro). The objective was to promote international scientific co-operation and networking in the area of Governance and Civil Society. Funding is provided by the Austrian Federal ministry for education, science and culture (bm:bwk) in the framework of its SEE science co-operation initiative. Proposals had to include one partner from Austria, one partner either from Slovenia or Bulgaria and at least one partner from the SEE countries. The projects are being carried out between July 1 2005 and May 31 2006.

There was a high level of interest and 40 proposals were received, with contributions of 159 institutions. Following expert evaluation, 10 projects were chosen to be funded. The Catching Up Societies project is one of those chosen which is being co-ordinated by Bulgarian scientists. The project was proposed by the Bulgarian Academy of Science (Institute for Philosophical Research), in co-operation with institutions from Austria, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Romania. It bridges the subject areas of gender studies, in particular the theme of women in science, and migration studies, in particular the theme of academic migration, and `brain drain' issues. It builds upon the cases of Bulgaria, Romania and Bosnia and Herzegovina (and Croatia) as sending countries and Austria (and Germany) as receiving countries. The project's target group is the highly qualified academic women in `hard sciences' (e.g. physics) and in engineering, with a special concern for young academic women in these fields.

The findings of the project will be uploaded on the website of the Institute for Philosophical Research of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. The project is being co-ordinated by Associate professor Dr. Nikolina Sretenova, Bulgarian ENWISE expert, from the Institute for Philosophical Research, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences.

The other Bulgarian co-ordinated project to be selected was proposed by the SEE Network for Science and Technology Studies (STS), entitled, STS Contributions to the Governance of Sociotechnical Change. The project will address the emergence of substantially different societies, economies and cultural spaces in Europe as a result of the past fifteen years of  "profound and dynamic processes of transformation". It states that these "processes sciences and technologies" appear to have acted both as "a source of some key societal problems and at the same time as effective tools in solving the problems". It postulates that "a sound and sustainable development of SEE societies will require active strategies to better understand and manage technological change," and that this is undeniably the case for countries like Slovenia and Bulgaria, which have been experiencing sustainable economic development for more than a decade and where "the introduction of new technologies and innovations is now on the agenda both of private sector and public governance".

The project's objective is to: "foster the exchange of accumulated expertise in the field of Science and Technology Studies between the partner countries involved and to discuss the relevant theoretical approaches and research methods for interdisciplinary research. This objective also includes identification of the policy implications of STS approach and exchange of ideas for improving the relationships between emerging STS community in South East Europe with civil society and the new structures of democratic governance."

The project's activities include a regional workshop, entitled Science and Technology Studies in Southeastern Europe, to be held in Plovdiv, between November 25-27, 2005, as well as local events in each of the partner countries, taking the form of one-day seminars where local STS experts will meet with policy makers, NGOs and media; and the development of common collaborative research projects on key issues of regional development. The project is being co-ordinated by Dr. Ivan Tchalakov of the Technology Studies Group, Institute of Sociology.