SWOT analysis of Tandooreh National Park (NE Iran) for sustainable ecotourism

摘要

Tandooreh National Park (TNP) is one of the important tourism areas in Iran which is included in the natural heritages of the Northeast of Iran. Present paper explores the possibility of sustainable ecotourism development in Tandooreh National Park with reference to judicious utilization of resource and local resident community. To plan and implement this, different management and decision making tools were used including interviews of local residents, visitors and the staff of the park, with the help of survey questionnaire (primary data) and secondary data acquired from Department of Environment (Iran Government), conference proceedings, books and journals. Based upon these data the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats (SWOT) were analyzed in order to identify the required management strategies to improve the sustainable tourism in the park. SWOT analysis has shown that the well established tourism destination with a variety of natural attractions and unique culture of local people having ancient culture are the strengths of Tandooreh National Park while lack of infrastructures and fundamental facilities are the major weaknesses. Proper ecotourism package development involving local people in decision making are found to be few of the main opportunities whereas tensions, restlessness and insecurity in neighbouring countries are the main threats. In order to maximize the internal strengths and external opportunities and to minimize internal weaknesses and external threats on the TNP several strategies have been suggested for the sustainable ecotourism development and management. However there is a scope for the improvement of the SWOT analysis in identifying more options for strategic management of sustainable ecotourism.