Evaluating Good Urban Governance for Iranian Cities (A Case Study of Ahvaz)

Urban Management is a decisive factor for improving the life quality for people for which various approaches have been adopted so far. Good governance is the last approach in urban management which concentrates on participation, transparency, responsibility, law force, justifying and accountability in governing. This approach in urban management can produce the desired outputs for organizations and people. Municipality and Islamic council of Ahwaz which are the two important organizations in urban management in Ahwaz can use good governance approach in fulfilling their duties. In this article, the researchers use people’s judgment in a sample community about the performance of municipality and Islamic council to study how much compatibility exists between the performances of these public organizations with good governance principles. The researchers also use a questionnaire for collecting people’s judgment. The results of this survey showed that the average of citizens’ judgment about the consistency of municipal and city council performance with good governance values are 1.41 and 1.22. Respondents say that municipality and council performance in index of rule of law (with average 1.66) is low and in index of participation (with average 0.98) is very low. If we accept the respondents’ judgments about municipality in districts of Ahwaz municipality in this study, judgments show that the performance of municipality management in district 3 with an average of 1.26 has low compatibility with good governance values and municipality management in district 1 with an average of 0.94 has very low compatibility. Generally, the performance of municipality and council in terms of compliance with the principles of good governance, (with average of judgment about 1.31) in a range of 4 values between bad and good, is weak.