Strategic analysis of social forestry by using SWOT and Entropy: The case study: villages of Margon in Boyer-Ahmad County

Abstract

The aim of this study was to investigate the current situation of social forestry in villages of Margon district in Boyer-Ahmad County. For data collection, were used two groups that consist of 15 forestry experts that they were selected with census and target sampling and 25 rural people that they were selected with snowball sampling. For preparation of study instrument, the first, was acted out by focusing group interview with experts and exploratory interview with rural people and SWOT protocol in format of open-ended questions with them and according to that, 35 structured and unit Likret’s questionnaire prepared for two groups. Due to analyze of collected data, was used SPSS20 and Excel2010. Findings revealed that the main strengths of social forestry was various forest development projects such as Toba, and the other, groundwork for development of marginal activities such as beekeeping, fisheries and against, a key weakness was lack of funding and credits for developing social forestry. Furthermore, establishing an educational-scientific station with the aim at regenerating scion and developing ecotourism were the most valuable opportunity in the study area and in contrast, the lack of governmental management, monitoring and planning and illegal occupation of forest land, were the biggest threats in forestry villages of Margon district. Findings also showed that the social forestry in the area was in undesirable condition. Finally, due to improving social forestry in the study villages, the first implementing diverse strategy was recommended.

Keywords

• Sustainable rural development
• Forest
• Villages forests
• Boyer Ahmad