Presenting the sustainable development model of mines in Iran based on tourism potentials

The purpose of this research is to present mine managers with solutions for the sustainable development of mines with an emphasis on mine tourism. In the first step, identifying ways for mine sustainable development with the use of tourism potentials by studying articles on a national and global scale taken from the SID citation center, Emerald, and Science through content analysis using Nvivo software, was in order. In the second step, 12 main factors were identified and confirmed with the help of the Delphi method and 12 university and industry experts, using EXCEL software. Then, by using tourism potentials with the ISM method and the participation of experts from the previous section, the development model of mines in Iran was achieved and an interpretive structural model was extracted. Finally, in the third step, in order to check the application of the proposed model, structural equation modelling analysis was done using PLS3 software with the participation of 170 managers and supervisors of Iranian mines. The final results acknowledged 12 ways as the final methods of mine sustainable development considering tourism potentials. In the eyes of the expert, mines' innovative reconstruction based on a tourism standpoint, tourism infrastructure improvement, increase in the region's social capital, business and employment growth based on tourism as a necessity were deemed the most effective ways of sustainable development for mines using tourism potentials. Evaluation of the proposed model in the field showed that among 32 theories, only the relationship between innovative mining tourism strategies and business prosperity and job creation based on tourism, the development of mine workers human resources and the development of the region's social capital and the relationship between the development of mine workers human resources and the prosperity of business and employment based on tourism was not approved.