Determining the factors of Rural perspective in Iran and evaluating them (Case study: Semnan Province Rural)

Rural development can be considered as the process of empowerment and reinforcing life ability in the context of life quality and environment as well as efficiency, economic independence, maintenance and environmental quality improvement in rural areas. There are approaches which consider tourism as an essential strategy for rural destinations. This approaches believe that due to rural areas degradation and agricultural wane, it is necessary to try for presenting new strategies for rural areas revivals by creating alternative activities and changing these areas based on their natural and human resources and the best for this revival is using particular strategies which benefits from human and natural resources and leads to revenue and rural welfare. Edward Inskeep, tourism planning scholar in his tourism development planning book argues that tourism planning is dynamic and stable and assists governments for identifying tourism future and its consequences. This will help governments to increase their roles in this process. Basically tourism and traveling is developed in urban areas. Many residents of urban are trying to find a way for escaping from this modern and sophisticated environments to least developed areas. From 70’s, tourism activities in rural areas have increased drastically in all developed countries around the globe. This had fundamental role in rural areas development from social as well as economical perspective. Therefore tourism experts believe that rural tourism development can not be taken into action without widespread reorganization in rural areas based on operational scientific planning. Hence identifying and introducing traveling destinations for rural areas is a first step for reaching rural tourism development goals. In this research we will try to investigate rural tourism situation and identifying effective indexes in determining rural tourism targets and evaluating these indexes using AHP model. This model will help to explore its role in rural development. In this dissertation we will have a look on rural tourism target in Semnan province and find their priority from tourism perspective.