Sustainability Assessment of tourism in cultural- historical villages of Iran with an emphasis on sustainable tourism development paradigm

For the past two decades, with the advent of sustainable development paradigm in tourism, concerns have been raised about the undesirable and destructive effects of mass tourism, and in this context many empirical studies and actions have been undertaken to operationalize this concept and its evaluation models. On the other hand, the manner of implementation and assessment of this progress has introduced a lotof challenges to the concept. This paper seeks to answer this key question: based on dimensions and effective indicators of sustainable development of rural tourism, what level of sustainability thehistorical-cultural villages of the country possess? We aim to develop a practical method for evaluating and monitoring the progresses made towards sustainable rural tourism development (SRTD) in terms of quality of human and natural systems, and to evaluate the sustainability level of tourism development in the historical-cultural villages of Iran during a specific period of time. With a descriptiveanalytical methodology, and with utilization of barometer and sustainability radar, we surveyed the locals', tourists’, and authoritie's opinions to assess and measure the progress towards the mentioned goal. Results indicated that the social and economic dimensions of tourism in these villages are more sustainable than environmental aspect, and that the historical-cultural villages of Iran have a relatively poor level of sustainability in general. Therefore, in order to advance towards SRTD in historical - cultural villages, it is necessary to create balance among the main elements of SRTD: fulfillment of local residents’ interests and needs, satisfaction of tourists, and maintenance of environmental values.