Assessing the Livelihood Capital of Mountainous Villages with a Sustainable Livelihood Approach (Case study: Kouhshah Rural District, Ahmadi District -Hormozgan)

Study of the problem of poverty in human societychr('39')s shows that villagers are among the poorest and most vulnerable human groups and ignoring to regard their living conditions can double the lack of development in human settlements. In other words, livelihood capital is the basis of empowerment and involvement of villagers in their individual and social destiny, which form the main foundation of community development. Therefore, the present study used a descriptive-analytical method to assess the livelihood capital status of mountain villages in Kouhshah Rural District in Ahmadi District with a sustainable livelihood approach. The research tool was a questionnaire (with reliability of 0.92) that collected data based on the framework of sustainable livelihood and analyzed the livelihood capital of villages. Findings showed that the amount of property and livelihood capital in different fields of human, financial, physical, natural, social in the studied villages is different and due to vulnerability in recent years the amount of physical, financial and natural assets have been decreased, and on the other hand, the amount of social and human assets have been increased. The results also show that the sustainability of livelihood capital is not the same, financial and physical capital with an average of 1.41 and 2.46 are among the most unstable capital, and social and human capital with an average of 3.68 and 3.25 are the most stable dimension of livelihood in the investigated rural areas. Therefore, according to the results, livelihood investments in mountainous villages are not desirable and this has provided the basis for instability of the region. In other words, in order to create desirable villages and get the residents out of the cycle of poverty and achieve stability in the region, one can not only pay attention to one dimension (economic) but applying different perspectives a holistic and systematic view, other dimension of financial, physical, and environmental need to be supported.