Sustainability assessment of rural areas using multi attribute decision making methods (case study: villages of Falavarjan County)

Reaching to a sustainable development of the country requires much attention to the sustainable development of rural areas. In this context, measuring and assessment of the sustainability with the aim of studying current situation, and understanding the differences between the regions in terms of sustainability indicators is very important in order to make optimal decisions regarding rural development. This article beside studying stability condition of rural areas of Falavarjan county in Isfahan province aims to surveying the dimensions and indicators that most affecting the sustainable rural development of this region. Present study is an applied one, and the method used in this research is a combination of descriptive and analytical methods. The obtained results based on the values of CL in TOPSIS model indicate that Mosian and Karsangan villages from Abrisham rural area with sustainability values of, respectively, 0.890 and 0.732, have highest ranks, and VazirAbad and RahimAbad villages from GarkanShomali rural area with sustainability values of, respectively, 0.187, and 0.138, have lowest sustainability ranks. In order to study the differences between different rural areas of the region in terms of sustainable indicators, Multivariate Analysis of Variance (MANOVA) and Dunken test are performed. Results show that between different rural areas of the Falavarjan County in terms of sustainability, in four dimensions of Economic , Environmental, Formation, and Access, meaningful differences exist and they can be grouped differently in each of these dimensions.