Restoring sustainable livelihoods of traditional villages through tourism development (Case Study: Nahook district, Saravan Township)

Abstract

In the past decades, improving sustainable livelihoods has attracted many researchers and planners. In this regard, one of the main approaches for improving sustainable livelihoods is to pay attention to the development of tourism. Considering the importance of this issue in this study, the revival of sustainable livelihoods of border villages was addressed through tourism development. The present research is applied in a targeted, applied way and the method of doing it is combination (qualitative and quantitative). The data-gathering tool was a questionnaire and interview. The statistical population consisted of rural households in Nahuk district in Saravan Township (N= 1618). Using the Cochran formula, 310 households were selected as the sample by quota sampling method. To analyze the data and data, analysis of variance, multivariate regression, and path analysis model were used. The results showed that there is a linear and significant relationship between tourism development and sustainable livelihoods recovery; accordingly, the highest impact of tourism on institutional factor is with coefficient (0.363) and the least effect on environmental factors with coefficient (0.182). Also, the results showed that despite the efforts of local authorities and popular participation in creating security infrastructure and improving the quality of providing favorable services for tourism development in the region, due to lack of provision of basic infrastructure, lack of access to appropriate communication networks to the tourist attractions in the villages And most importantly, security problems, which are the result of the borderline situation in the villages of the region, have been identified as the main barriers to tourism development in the villages of this Townships.

Keywords

• rural tourism
• revival of rural communities
• sustainable livelihoods
• saravan township