Multi attribute ranking of strategies regarding strengthening public participation to conservehistorical remains and civilization heritages on the basis of sustainable development paradigm

The protection of historical, cultural and natural heritage is a vital necessity in the present era. Carrying this operation out has great enconomic, social and cultural benefits that will play a role as an effective factor to establish sustainable development. In the current years, Iran follows the development prospects programs to expand its non oil industries such as cultural heritage industry that will play an important role in the sustainable development, and decrease its maladaptive and humongous dependence on oil export revenue. Since protection of historical remains and preservation of heritage of the Iranian civilization is a public duty, boosting public participation in the safekeeping process would be highly effective in protection and sustainable prosperity of the aforementioned heritages. As sustainable development is a multidisciplinary paradigm, a multi-attribute decision making approach is needed. The current study, implements a combination of hierarchical structure and the Technique for Order of Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) to respectively obtain the significance of sustainable development’s attributes, and the options of maximizing the public's involvement. Based on the results, protection of natural resources and use of the various potentials of the social networks was the most important attribute and option, respectively. Due to relative sustainability of the ranking lists after performing the sensitivity analysis, it could be concluded that the decision making process was done properly. Hence, this approach is recommended for other managerial and conservation issues in different fields of civil engineering and architecture.