Meta-Analysis of Livelihood Resilience Studies in Rural Areas of Iran

Background and Purpose: Livelihood resilience is a combination of the concepts of resilience and livelihood, which is used to study the livelihoods of rural people and their resilience after disruptions and shocks. It has been widely used in various research areas such as climate change, disaster management, food security, social ecology, and sustainable development. In this regard, the present study seeks to rely on the meta-analysis of studies conducted in the field of rural livelihood resilience, while identifying the theories used to explain livelihood resilience, the variables and factors affecting it, and to explain what variables are related to livelihood resilience in rural areas of Iran, as a dependent variable, and what variables are affected by the improvement of livelihood resilience in the country's regions? In order to prepare the ground for future research to improve and promote livelihood resilience in these types of communities.
Methodology: The approach used in the present study is qualitative and based on the documentary method of meta-analysis. The statistical population of this study is the studies that have been written in the period from 2013 to 2022 on the subject of livelihood resilience in Iran. In order to select the sample, according to the purpose of the research in relation to the study of the status of these studies in rural areas, as a result, these studies were refined based on the thematic relationship with the topic of livelihood resilience in rural areas of Iran, and finally 18 study documents, including scientific-research, conference, and proposal articles and academic dissertations that were directly done in this subject area were selected and reviewed. In this regard, the process of selecting the sample documents was as follows: the researchers searched and collected the relevant research background, including library and electronic, within the framework of the research objectives and problem, and in this regard, despite the existence of an extensive list of studies in the field of livelihood resilience, only the researches that were located in rural areas were selected. The screening process and the strategy used to select the studies were based on the use of keywords including "livelihood resilience, livelihood resilience, along with words such as village, household, rural households, villagers" in the titles of previous studies.
Findings and Discussion: In the studies reviewed, sustainable livelihood variables (including: sustainable livelihood indicators, livelihood strategies, and livelihood capital) and then, types of natural hazards and contextual variables have the highest frequency in the discussion of livelihood resilience in rural areas. Among the sustainable livelihood indicators, the share of "economic" and "socio-cultural" indicators is greater than other indicators and dimensions of sustainable livelihood, which actually indicates the strong impact of these indicators on increasing the livelihood resilience of the rural areas studied. Among the types of natural hazards, the share of the drought variable is greater than the other hazards, which has been studied as an effective hazard in the livelihood resilience of rural areas. Examining the effect of contextual variables shows that researchers have paid attention to important variables such as gender, women, and other contextual variables that affect the livelihood resilience of rural areas in Iran.
Conclusion: The analysis showed that the research conducted in the area of livelihood resilience in rural settlements can be categorized into (sustainable livelihoods), (natural disasters) and (situational variables). The sustainable livelihoods variable was the most numerous variable measured by researchers regarding various aspects of its relationship to livelihood resilience issues in rural settlements. In other words, from the perspective of the studies examined, sustainable livelihoods indicators and factors contribute more to decreased or increased livelihood resilience in rural settlements than other variables.