Assessing the Indicators of Good Governance in Development of Urban Tourism (Case Study: City of Tehran)

Urban tourism is proposed as one of the influential and stimulus factor in urban economy. Tourism and policy-making style in tourism development planning require the utilization of new techniques in urban governance. Municipalities, as main custodians of urban management, play an important role in preparing the ground for participatory space in urban tourism arena as well as empowering citizens in urban areas. Thus, by assessing the indicators of good governance in urban tourism management, the ground can be prepared to implement these 10 indicators i.e. marketing, collaborative partnership, responsiveness, efficiency and effectiveness, justice-orientation, law-orientation, accountability, investment safety, integrated management in policy-making, and financial transparency in Tehran Metropolis. In terms of data collection, this research is descriptive-correlation, and it is applied in terms of purpose, by using documentary and field studies. Data were collected by questionnaire distributed in two population samples including authorities and professors of Iranian Tourism Scientific Association during summer 2016. They were 240 people and 148 of them were selected randomly by using Morgan table. To collect data, a researcher-made questionnaire including 96 items was used. The reliability was 0.97. Survey data via structured questionnaire were distributed electronically among population. Data were analyzed by using Friedman test and SPSS software. The results indicated that among 10 intended indicators, marketing was identified as the most important index of good governance in urban tourism according to the respondents.