Владислав Тодоров

Being an integral part of the past cultural heritage, the traditional Bulgarian folklore festivals, carnivals, and celebrations are continuing to promote sustainable practices that venerate and respect nature. The article focusses specifically on celebrations related to food and plant growing. It reviews the intangible cultural heritage of the Bulgarian folklore, including traditions whose roots originated from pagan rituals but continue to be observed now. A description of the Kukeri carnival, Trifon Zarezan, Baba Marta, Peperuda (Butterfly), Rose Festival, Nestinari dancing rituals, and Enyovden are provided within a sustainability context. A common feature between these celebrations is the respect for nature and its healing capacity with people being perceived as part of the natural world. These traditional folklore festivities have survived the test of time with very little commercialisation. Food plays a major role in them, but most importantly, they help maintain the community spirit and social bonding.

The Bangladeshi folklore cultural heritage embraces myriad proverbs, adages, sayings, folktales, and folksongs, including the songs of the Baul mystic minstrels. Many are linked to various aspects of agriculture – from tilling to harvest, storage of yields, and consumption. The paper draws on this folklore to develop the concept of traditional sustainability accounting in agriculture. Although without formal quantification, these proverbs and songs guide agricultural practices in rural Bangladesh maintaining a socio-economic system that promotes sustainable activities, counteracts the damage caused by the 1970 Green Revolution, and encourage sustainability accounting. In recent years, Bangladesh has achieved many of the Millennium Development Goals but has also witnessed environmental deterioration. An agro-ecological management informed by folklore and traditional wisdom has the potential to transform the country’s progress along the lines of the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

Sustainable development in its various aspects is a multifaceted and contradictory concept, interpreted by multiple sources. This study exposes the need to explore and develop a productive coevolutionary approach to build modular ontological metamodel of sustainable development including a set of interconnected ontologies and instance databases. Based on a review and on an analysis of existing ontologies in this area, a methodology for building common ontology of sustainable development is proposed as a top level of the metamodel. Using terminology from well-established and authoritative sources in the area, as well as the methods, the resources, and the standards of Semantic Web, the methodology contains stages: exploring the SD concepts; controlled vocabulary and thesaurus creating; ontology formalization, verification, querying, and publication. Relationships with the respective domain and other related to sustainable development ontologies are established. In conclusion, the results and the future development of the ontological metamodel are discussed.

The use of geographic information systems (GIS) as a tool for data presenting and analyzing in various areas of modern society becomes more and more relevant and aproved. GIS provide rich opportunities for complex analysis of many economic indicators combined with spatial (geographical) data. The competitiveness consolidating such indicators isa complex and multifaceted concept measured by index highly depending on the level of awareness in technological, organizational and managerial aspects. This determines the application of information and communication technologies (ICT), including GISfor data gathering, exchange, processing and storage, for outputinformation, as well as for knowledge generation in order to management decisionsupport in business organizations. The literature review shows a large number of firmcompetitiveness researches but none of them are related to GIS. The article investigates an innovative model of an online application using GIS for firmcompetitivenessanalysis. The model of the application has a modular structure, including modules of:interface, online GIS, functionality (business logics) and firm database. The interface module contains webpagesfor queries and results from analysis with spatial localization. The module of functionality covers scripts of the functions for:data entry and support, firm competitivenessindex calculation, GISand firm database connections, index ranking, factor, comparative and trend analysis,and others. A methodof firmcompetitiveness indexcalculation, developed by the authors in their previous research, is applied. In addition to the methodology, methods are used to: determine user access levels; selectionof GIS layers; analysis of firm competitiveness. The GIS module includes spatial and attribute data in layers of: basic administrative map, transport network, urban territories, engineering infrastructure, demography, water resources, and firmsfor selected region. The firm database contains main firm data and the respective competitiveness indicators. The analysis is consistent with standard classifier of the business sectors and includes firm ranking in accordance with theircompetitiveness indices forselected business sector andtime period. The proposed model is a basis of software application development for diagnostics and analysis intended for business analysts and firm managers, researching the firmpositions and bottlenecks, helpingmanagement decision making.

This study aims to make some summaries and suggest some conclusions about the quality of training at the Faculty of Business Management (FBM) of the University of Forestry, Sofia, Bulgaria(UF). The level of students preparation in leading areas of their qualification was studied: the application of mathematical methods and models in economics and the level of proficiency and application of modern information technologies (IT) as an element of the quality management system of education at University of Forestry, Sofia, Bulgaria. Two important and interconnected areas of knowledge, skills and competencies of future forestry managersand forest industry managers, as well as of economists in the alternative tourism sector are discussed, for which the University of Forestry, Bulgariaonly trains university graduates at Bachelor Degreein Business Management and Alternative Tourism in Bulgaria. A special questionnaire survey was developed and, through a direct anonymous survey conducted in April 2019, to which 46 students responded, data were collected on the opinion of trainees in full-time Bachelor Degree courses in Business Management andAlternative Tourism of University of Forestry, Bulgaria. The collected results are summarized and a comparison is made with the exam results in the subjects that prepare the students in the studied problem areas. The summarized answers from the questionnaire allow for a more objective assessment of students’ opinions on how they assess their skills in applying mathematical methods and models in business practice (studied in the first year in the course Econometrics) and the lessons learned in the related course with the acquisition of computerinformation technologies (a total of 8 for the whole course of study in the specialty Business Management and4 for the specialty Alternative Tourism) in studying the content of the subjects in the curriculum of the specialties in the Faculty of Business Management, as and applying knowledge to solve practical problems and case studies from business practices. An attempt has been made to compare students’ summaries of the survey questions with summarized exam scores in some of the study subjects for the 2018/2019 academic year. The study results, the conclusions drawn, and summaries may be helpful to improve the quality of training in the specialties of Faculty of Business Management, as well as to be used in the analysis and updating of the curricula and the syllabus of each discipline in the specialties in University of Forestry, Bulgariain the field of economics, organization and management of forestry, forest industry, nature management, agribusiness and alternative tourism.

Good governance is a prerequisite for a transition toward a more sustainable development. Within western democracy, governance is understood either as a management function or as a leadership role played by the government, politicians, business, academics, not-for-profit and community organizations or just particular individuals within civil society. More recently, this top–down approach has been challenged by the newly emerging methods of deliberative democracy which entrust the power of decision-making to randomly selected representatives of the public following intensive processes of deliberation. The role of experts in the process is to inform the deliberations, and the role of the traditional structures of power within society is to implement the outcomes from the deliberations. Information availability is a serious condition for the potential of deliberative democracy to be fulfilled. Within the climate change imperatives, the focus of information delivery should be on allowing for a global picture to be created as the basis for individual localized decision-making. Based on the unprecedented power of computer and communication technology, this chapter puts forward the concept of a Global Green Information System (GGIS) which can provide the virtual space for and support on-line deliberative democracy processes. The functions that such a GGIS can provide are monitoring, information storage and transmission, facilitation of decision-making and analysis of virtual sustainability models. Despite its enormous importance and input, the GGIS however will only be a tool in the broader deliberative processes guided by the value systems represented by society members.

The article presents a general classification of the models being developed in the area of sustainability arguing that the existing models represent the historical conceptualisation of sustainability starting from environmental constraints and moving towards economic valuation and social behaviour and policies. Coupled with computer power, sophisticated models with a varying levels of complexity have also been developed (static/dynamic; local/global; specific/general). However as any model is a simplification of the complex reality, the main purpose of any sustainability modelling (and the newly emerging area of sustainometrics) should be to allow dynamic representation, including the co-evolution of the sustainability systems and the role of humans as sustainability guardians.