Agrotechnology

Transitions towards sustainable development in rural areas: Transition management insights from Bulgaria

4^th International Conference on Agriculture & Horticulture

July 13-15, 2015 Beijing, China

Mira Alyakova

Posters-Accepted Abstracts: Agrotechnol

Abstract:

Our society faces a lot of unstable situations like climate change, pollution, demographic, health, educational and economic crisis, wars at once. In the beginning of 21st century, a group of scientists describes these actual themes like problems of one unsustainable society and construct a new model of thinking for these emergent problems�??Transition Theory (2000). Now, transition theory is applied in many different fields across Europe and the World, Dutch governance applying transition management since 2014. The authors (Frank Geels, Jan Rotmants, Derk Loorbach, Niki Frantzeskaki) describe transition like fundamental change of the social system in culture, structure and practice and the co-evolution of this three elements. Researchers said that for one transition is needed 25-50 years (one generation). Pretty good examples of such transition is �??from carriage to automobile�?�, �??from telegraph to smartphones�?�, �??from intensive to bio farming�?�; from conventional electricity to green electricity�?�. Transition theory has three main perspectives�??Multi level perspectives, Multi phase concept and Multi pattern concept. Second part of transition theory is Transition Management. This article should give a brief description of what Transition Thinking is and which methodology better suits it. For applying Transition theory for a base of a research, better approach isparticipatory active research, semi structured interviews, in-depth analysis of the stakeholders, focus groups and developing a scenario.At the end author will provide some examples of transitions towards sustainability in rural areas; case studies from Bulgaria (3 to 5 or 5 to 7 examples).

Biography :

Mira Alyakova is pursuing her PhD at the age of 29 years from UNWE and is a Sustainable Transitions Research Network Member. During her Doctoral degree she was in many workshops as a trainer for training in Transition Management, all in Europe, some in Dutch Research Institute for Future Transitions-fathers of Transition Management. She is a mentor of a one-year project of European Voluntary Service. She was part of the Bulgarian team of a research project funded by 7th Framework of EU-FarmPath-Pathways towards sustainable transitions in agriculture in Europe. Teaching Development in rural areas and Bulgarian language for foreigners.