Farmers’ livelihood resilience and its optimisation path in world heritage sites: a Chinese case study

In the context of global environmental change and tourism market volatility, the livelihood resilience in World Heritage Site (WHS) faces serious challenges. We designed a combinatorial assessment model aimed at analyzing and enhancing the household livelihood resilience in WHS. By combining barrier degree model and fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis, we provide an identification of the key factors determining the livelihood resilience in WHS and selects Yulong River National Area in Guangxi, China, as a case site. Results suggested that (i) The livelihood resilience in WHS is generally low, with relatively high self-organization capacity, medium levels of psychological perception and buffer capacity, and the weakest learning capacity; (ii) The Livelihood Resilience Index varies according to the type of main livelihood activity of the household, which is ranked in ascending order as tourism livelihood, worker livelihood, farming livelihood, and multi-income source livelihood; (iii) On different livelihood dimensions, buffer capacity has the most significant impact among tourism livelihood and farming livelihood, while self-organization capacity plays a key role among farming livelihood and multi-income source livelihood. In addition, the size of tourism operated house, voice in rural tourism development, social connectivity and household educational inputs were the major barriers to livelihood resilience among all types of households; (iv) Through configurational analysis, we further reveal three main pathways for achieving high livelihood resilience.