Zoning the Villages of Central District of Dena County in Terms of Sustainability of Livelihood Capitals

The sustainable livelihood approach was introduced as a sustainable rural development approach in the late 1980s with the aim of poverty alleviation in the rural communities. This approach has offered a broad framework for assessing the various dimensions of sustainability. An important component of this framework is livelihood capitals in a way that it is not possible to achieve sustainable rural livelihood with no regard to the livelihood capitals and assets in rural areas. Thus, the purpose of this descriptive-analytic survey research was zoning the villages of the Central District of Dena County in terms of the sustainability of livelihood capitals. The statistical population of this study was 2500 rural households in the Central District of Dena County, of which 300 households were selected using cluster random sampling method with appropriate allocation based on Krejcie and Morgan’s table. The research instrument was a researcher-made questionnaire whose face validity was confirmed by a panel of experts, and its reliability was confirmed in a pre-test and calculating Cronbach's alpha coefficient. Findings of the research showed that, in most studied villages, 3 capitals (social, physical, and human) were above the average and 2 capitals (financial and natural) as well as the total capital was less than average. Additionally, there was a gap and heterogeneity between the villages in terms of social, human, natural capital as well as financial capital, whereas there was a homogeneity in terms of physical and total capital as well. Besides, the most studied villages were potentially unsustainable in terms of financial and natural capital, average level in terms of human and physical capital and total capital, and potentially sustainable in terms of social capital. In addition, cluster analysis to categorize villages indicated that 9, 4, and 7 villages were categorized as non-privileged, semi-privileged, and privileged, respectively. Furthermore, the result of Analysis Of Variance (ANOVA) indicated that there was a significant difference between three categories of villages in terms of social, physical, financial and natural capital, and total capital. Therefore, non-privileged and semi-privileged villages should be given more consideration by planners, who need to pay more attention to regional planning than general planning.