The European waste policy is focused on reducing the negative impact of waste, eliminating the unhealthy use of resources, and on better waste management. The aim of this paper is to analyse Romania’s waste management practices in the EU context. The research methodology is based on a quantitative and qualitative analysis. The descriptive data analysis reveals significant differences among EU countries in terms of the municipal waste generated and the recycling rate. The municipal waste generated registers decrease, whereas there are significant increases in terms of the recycling rates in the EU countries. The qualitative research is based on the analysis of structured interviews among stakeholders, relevant for the waste management in Romania. The information obtained based on interviews was processed using NVivo and the main findings are focused on recommendations for improving the waste management system. We have identified a lack of adequate public support in the waste field due to insufficient awareness programs, lack of operator’s obligation for separate waste sanitation, people's discouragement to separate their household waste, and lack of bins to separate collection. The correction of identified weaknesses could lead to an improved waste management system, feasible only through an active involvement of stakeholders

The research aim was to identify the training needs of entrepreneurs and employees within small and medium enterprises (SMEs) from the Suceava, Chernivtsi, and Bălți regions, to analyze the specific training practices in the cross-border area, and to identify the common features or the disparities. The research contains an exploratory survey, based on a semi-structured questionnaire that investigates the training needs in the SMEs and specific training practices with a comparative approach. The results relate to the challenges faced by transformation economies and by the specificities of SMEs from these remote areas. Additionally, the research connects the factors involved in planning and delivering training programs for employees in SMEs in this EU peripheral area with the weaknesses of the companies in facing the market competitive economy. The results of the survey disclosed some common features and specificities related to training needs, training responsibilities, and interests in the SMEs from this cross-border area. The discussions are relevant for different categories of stakeholders, at the micro-level, for the management of the companies, but also on a larger scale, in planning the new development programs for the labor market in the targeted areas.

Urban destinations worldwide face many challenges, including an increasing number of visitors, a growing number of people living in cities, and economic and environmental disruptions, to name but a few. Sustainable development of urban destinations is thus an important topic that researchers have started to examine over the past decade. Still, little has been written on sustainable tourism development and the challenges faced by city destinations from Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), a region with a tumultuous history, many conquests, turmoil, and displacements. These events are reflected in the rich culture and diverse traditions that are maintained even today in some cities from the region. This chapter aims to contribute to filling this gap by discussing the challenges faced by CEE countries in their efforts to promote and implement sustainable tourism initiatives, with a focus on urban destinations. Additionally, it briefly explores the situation of sustainable urban tourism in post-communist Romania and presents examples of best practice in sustainable tourism implementation from several CEE cities.

The built heritage is an important resource of the cultural landscape, a landscape that has recorded in the last two decades, in almost all areas of Romania, dramatic mutations favored by a permissive legislative framework and the confusing application of new constructive models in representative tourist destinations. The lack of an adequate knowledge of the built heritage, of an inventory of the existing valuable resources, leads to an inconsistency of the conservation policies and inappropriate interventions of the public or private owners of these resources. Lately, many publications bring into discussion the built cultural heritage of the rural area and the need for policies to capitalize on it. Unfortunately, proposals on the protection of the cultural landscape are often made in the absence of a precise analysis of the existing situation in the field, of an inventory of the existing valuable elements, this leading to the neglect of important aspects regarding the preservation of valuable elements of the vernacular architecture. In order to bring rigor in the documentation of traditional buildings, we have developed a field research methodology, which we want to present in this work, while emphasizing the importance of recording the valuable elements of the built heritage. Thus, there will be exposed objectives to the research, the methods used, with the intention of making available to other research teams a series of tools that can be used in documenting the elements of the built heritage, or that can be a starting point in the development of other optimized methods.