Good Governance Based Rural Management and its Role in Sustainable Rural Development (Case Study: A Comparison between Central District of Kuhdasht and Lavasanat District of Shemiranat)

Good governance, as an approach in rural man-agement, is the engagement of government, pri-vate sector and civil society, based on active and effective participation, transparency, ac-countability, rule of law, justice, Consensus-oriented Responsiveness, efficiency, and effec-tiveness as well as human development. This paper aims to provide an analysis of the present condition of ‘good governance based rural management’ and its role in the sustainable rural development in two regions (central district of Kuhdasht, and Lavasanat Shemiranat). The pa-per also studies the relationship between good governance indicators and sustainable rural de-velopment.
Rural good governance as an approach is one of the newest and most famous approaches in sus-tainable management of rural sustainable devel-opment. This approach is considerably power-ful in explaining the realities. It is also useful in policy making in the case of sustainable rural development. It is because the rural good gov-ernance pays a special attention to institutional-izing, enabling, and empowering local people's participatory development. The main debate in this part of the article is the relationship be-tween the good governance and sustainable ru-ral development and their effects on each other. Good governance is defined as transparent and responsible management with a special focus on fair and sustainable development in social and economic aspects. Then, rural good governance is a process, in which, all actors of rural man-agement are engaging.
In this paper we used a descriptive–analytical approach. Survey and questionnaires were used for gathering data. The sample includes 280 households in 27 villages in the above men-tioned regions. In order to achieve the purpose, we used different numerical models, such as VIKOR, multivariate regression, and correla-tion.
THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK: The process aimed development of place and prosperity of the local people. In other words, rural good governance is implementing policies and decisions, two eleven by local people, in order to their living condition, so rural sus-tainable development is the process of maiming rural areas in away.
While the literature on sustainable development covers many of the issues raised in the early literature on economic growth models, it seems fair to say that whatever the merits of the origi-nal formulation in the Brundtland Report of 1987, one decade later there has been great ad-vances in both the theoretical aspects of desira-ble development and the ways in which that development might be indicated. Hence, there has been an ongoing debate regarding the mean-ing of constant capital, the relative merits of weak and strong sustainable development as a framework for analyzing these issues, the in-creasing attention given to the concept of criti-cal natural assets, and more recently the role of social capital formation and maintenance in the development process.
Thus, good governance expresses approval for a type of government, usually a democratic one, and its related political values. Equating govern-ance with government focuses on technical problems of administrative and legal capacity and the improvement of public sector manage-ment, the legal framework for sustainable de-velopment, accountability through better audit-ing, decentralization, the policing of corruption, civil service reform, and improved information on policy issues for both decision-makers and the public. Finally, good governance has been defined as a framework of private non-governmental bodies that have a role to play in the formulation and implementation of public policy and the delivery of public services.
The results show that rural areas with higher good governance level are more sustainable. Rural areas in Lavasanat district owe good gov-ernance and sustainable position to institutional arrangement. Hence, the weakness of this insti-tutional arrangement is an indicator for the good governance level in Kuhdasht central district.
Based on the VIKOR model, which provides us with a QI result ranging from 0 to 1, rural areas with QI=0 are the most sustainable areas with a high level of governance and rural areas with QI=1 are the worst areas based on the sustaina-bility and good governance. The result of this study showed that all rural areas in Lavasanat have a QI between 0-0.5. We can claim that these rural areas have a reasonable sustainabil-ity and a good level of governance. On the oth-er side, in Kuhdasht, we can classify rural areas in two different classes; seven rural areas with a QI between 0.5-0.8 and thirteen rural areas with a QI between 0.8-1. The first group has a medi-um level of sustainability and governance while the second group is neither sustainable nor has good governance.
The other model used in this article was the re-gression analysis. The result of this model showed that the model is acceptable and can forecast both governance level and sustainabil-ity.
The result shows that good governance in dif-ferent rural areas can be recognized into two different levels. At the same time, there is a close tie between good governance and sustain-able rural development as well as their indica-tors. Hence, as it has been shown in the article, rural areas with higher governance position have a better situation in the sustainable rural development.