Decision-making about Barriers to Establishing Shared Farms with the Approach of Achieving Sustainable Development Goals

Based on the goals of sustainable development, a new socio-economic system has emerged, which is known as the shared economy. A shared economy shares resources among people and helps to reduce negative environmental and social effects and costs. Also, the agricultural sector in Iran is prone to negative stability. Therefore, it is necessary to consider strategies to promote and implement the shared economy in the field of agriculture. This study aims to identify the barriers of implementation a shared economy in agriculture in the central plateau of Iran.

This research method is descriptive-survey and is practical in terms of purpose. The statistical sample of this research is 15 experts and farmers in the shared farming fields in the central plateau of Iran, who were selected based on judgmental sampling. In this research, based on the review of the research literature, the barriers to establishing shared farms were identified. Then, based on the opinion of the experts, the identified barriers are localized and a decision tree was formed. Next, the matrices of pairwise comparisons were formed at each level of the decision tree. Finally, the barriers were ranked and prioritized based on Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) method using Expert Choice version 11 software.

Based on the results of the research, the barriers to the implementation of shared farms in the central plateau of Iran were prioritized into four groups economic, social, technical, and stakeholders' barriers. Also, based on the results, in order, capital cost, lack of incentives, lack of willingness to change, lack of technology, and lack of communication platforms are identified as the most important sub-barriers to the implementation of shared farms in the central plateau of Iran.

Based on the results of the research and prioritization of the main and sub-main barriers to the implementation of shared farms, economic barriers and in particular, the capital cost, is the most important barriers to the successful implementation of shared farms in the central plateau of Iran. Therefore, it is suggested that the revenue model and the calculation of ROI are carefully calculated and estimated before the start of the shared farming process and explained to the partners. Also, considering the importance of the lack of incentives as a barrier, it is suggested that in order to promote the culture of shared farming and its successful implementation, material incentives (such as financial support and provision of facilities) and spiritual incentives (such as Appreciation of successful shared farming businesses and social incentives) should be more considered.