Investigation on the public opinion of people in the Smolyan region focuses on determining the public awareness of sustainable development (SD) and the policies related to it, on the one hand, as well as finding out if the people from this region take actions, corresponding to SD, without associating them with it, on the other hand. The article also contributes to revealing the barriers which arise with the implementation of SD, being laid down in the Regional Strategy for Development of the Smolyan Region for 2014-2025. The research toolkit includes a survey (on-line), using Google’s functions of data collection and processing. To come to the most adequate and applicable conclusions on mountain regional development, the territorial scope of the study is based on the idea that a "region" is considered to be a mountainous territorial system within an area that includes all mountainous municipalities according to all typologies.

regional sustainable development (RSD), mountain region, survey