Introduction and Objective: Agri-tourism is considered as an entrepreneurial and innovative strategy for economic diversification and combating rural decline. Despite Iran's high potential, the development of this industry faces structural obstacles, and a deep understanding of farmers' entrepreneurial motivations, especially in relation to sustainable development dimensions, remains an important theoretical and empirical gap. This study was conducted with the overall aim of identifying and analyzing the impact of multiple dimensions of entrepreneurial motivations on the formation of Agri-tourism and explaining its role in achieving sustainable economic, social, and environmental development in rural areas of Iran.


Methodology: This study was conducted with a mixed approach and sequential exploratory design (qualitative-quantitative) and adopting the philosophy of pragmatism. In the qualitative phase, data were collected using purposive sampling and in-depth semi-structured interviews with 9 expert and leading Agri-tourism entrepreneurs until theoretical saturation was reached and analyzed using Brown and Clark's six-step content analysis method and MAXQDA 2020 software. In the quantitative phase, based on the extracted themes, a researcher-made questionnaire was designed and, after confirming the content validity by 5 experts and calculating the reliability with Cronbach's alpha (above 0.7), it was distributed to a sample of 210 people active in Agri-tourism businesses in four main regions of Iran (north, west, center and south, east) who were selected by random stratified sampling. Quantitative data were analyzed using structural equation modeling with the partial least squares approach (PLS-SEM) and SmartPLS4 software and using the bootstrapping algorithm (with 5000 subsamples).


Findings: The findings of the qualitative section led to the extraction of 20 initial codes and ultimately 5 main themes (categories) as drivers of the formation of Agri-tourism: 1) economic and pragmatic motives (survival-oriented and response to economic and climatic pressures), 2) social and family bond motives (family commitments and sense of social responsibility), 3) internal and psychological motives (self-fulfillment, intrinsic interest, and individual creativity), 4) cultural and environmental motives (substantive rationality and moral values), and 5) institutional and model-oriented motives (influence from successful models and response to institutional gaps). In the quantitative section, the measurement model had favorable convergent validity (AVE>0.5), divergent validity (Fornell-Larker criterion and HTMT), and composite reliability (CR>0.7). The structural model showed that the five motivation categories explained a total of 52.3% of the variance of the Agri-tourism formation variable (R²=0.523). Based on the standardized path coefficients (β), economic and pragmatic motivations (β=0.425, t=3.151, p