The Future of Education

Business education still lacks transferable instructional models for teaching low-salience sustainability risks that students do not readily recognize as immediate managerial and communication challenges. This paper presents and tests a competency-based instructional framework that uses water stress in Bulgaria as a context for teaching risk interpretation, stakeholder reasoning, and public communication before crisis conditions emerge. The Bulgarian case is instructionally relevant because official statistics show that 5.8% of the population experienced drought-related water-supply restrictions in 2024.

A quasi-experimental design is implemented with two intact groups of fourth-year Business Management students. The comparison group follows a conventional case-based format, whereas the intervention group completes a scenario-based sequence combining simulations, gamified tasks, stakeholder role-play, and structured message mapping. The intervention is designed to strengthen engagement while integrating analysis, decision-making, and communication under uncertainty.

The study examines two outcomes. First, it evaluates the quality of student discussion during structured deliberation on water-stress scenarios, focusing on argument quality, evidence use, stakeholder reasoning, and decision coherence. Second, it assesses applied communication competence through the quality of message maps and drafted public-facing statements, with attention to clarity, specificity, actionability, and trust-preserving framing. The paper contributes an implementable teaching design, an assessment-oriented competency framework, and a transferable model for embedding sustainability-risk education in business curricula.