The Role of Creative Tourism in Sustainable Development of Rural Areas (Case Study: Historic-Cultural Villages in North-West of Iran)

Ineffectiveness and unsustainability of classic approaches to respond to socioeconomic challenges in rural areas is one of the biggest barriers to sustainable development and achieving its goals. Hence, modern tourism as a new strategy has been able to be effective in the evolution of sustainable development in rural areas. Such that today emergence of postmodern tourism has made the tourists be more willing to use cultural attractions and unique experiences in tourism destinations, and the big entertaining places are not attractive to them anymore. On the other hand, rural areas have constantly faced difficulties in attracting tourists because of poverty and economic problems; therefore, creative tourism has been presented as an appropriate approach in developing rural tourism, since it does not need huge investments and uses the existing cultural and natural aspects. Therefore, the present study aims at investigating the role of creative tourism in rural sustainable development and ranking the sample villages according creative tourism components. The present study is an applied study with regard to function and is a descriptive-analytic study with regard to its nature. We used field and library methods based on observation and questionnaire for data collection. Validity of the questionnaire items was confirmed by experts and using Cronbach alpha formula (0.856). The statistic population includes the households of six historic-cultural villages in northwest of Iran; 313 household heads were randomly selected using the Cochran formula. Statistical tests such as one sample t-test, multi-variate linear regression, and Kruskal–Wallis test were used for data analysis. The results indicated that the mean values are higher than 3 for all the components of creative tourism except risk taking which is 2.99; the components are also significant at 0.01 level indicating desirable conditions of the target villages with regard to creative tourism. Investigation of regression fitness model indicated that 0.83 of the positive effect of tourism on rural sustainable development is due to creativity in tourism. Also, according to beta values, among the five components of creative tourism, participation (0.286) and and risk taking (0.181) were the most and least effective factors in rural sustainable development through tourism, respectively. The results of Kruskal–Wallis test indicated that Kandovan (65.257) was at the first rank and Varkaneh (41.71) was at the sixth rank with regard to creative tourism and the consequent sustainable development.