Revealing the role of livelihood assets in livelihood strategies: Towards enhancing conservation and livelihood development in the Hara Biosphere Reserve, Iran

Livelihood in Iran's rural areas, as elsewhere in the developing world, is highly intertwined with the harvesting of environmental resources, leading to severe environmental degradation. To shed light on possible solutions, this study employs the conceptual framework of sustainable livelihood and the multinomial logit model. This reveals the intra-household determinants of each livelihood strategy that significantly contribute to designing better livelihoods and socio-economic development programs. Such factors alleviate environmental resource demand, and thus degradation. By employing a two-step cluster analysis with seven indicators related to households' livelihood activity, three distinctive livelihood strategies were identified, including commercial, mixed, and fishery/livestock strategies. Livelihood assets that encompass human, physical, social, natural, and financial assets are considered as dependent variables, while household livelihood strategies are independent variables. Data was collected through both qualitative and quantitative methods, including household surveys, direct observation, and unstructured interviews with local informants and administrators. The results show that enhancing financial, social, and human assets have facilitated adopting commercial and mixed strategies, while physical assets have enhanced the propensity toward the fishery/livestock strategy. Moreover, although financial assets are the most significant assets in facilitating adoption of non-environmental strategies, enhancing environmental pursuer's access to financial resources alone, without improving their human and social assets, may lead to higher harvesting efforts. Therefore, the study concludes that interventions aimed at enhancing both conservation and livelihoods should improve the human, social, and financial assets of resource users, to facilitate the adoption of less environmentally reliant and profitable strategies.