The Impact of Social Participation on Local Governance Performance (Islamic Town and Village Councils - Municipal and rural governors) Case Study: Damavand City

Given the importance of the role of local management in urban and rural development and understanding the factors that influence it this research seeks to examine social participation and its importance, analyze its relationship with the performance of local governments (city and village councils, municipal-rural) using field data. This research is a mixed one and has been done in a quantitative way through survey research and in the qualitative part, focused interviews have been used.The population of this study is 18 years old and older people living in Damavand towns and villages according to Cochran's formula, the sample size is 382 data were collected through questionnaire and interview form in this research simple random sampling method is used.Interviews were also conducted with the use of purposeful sampling to theoretically saturate the experts and councilors.In conclusion, it can be concluded that there is a strong correlation between social participation and research dependent variable (performance of local administrations) with a coefficient of 0.511. That is, with the increase in social participation, local management performance improves as well.