The Status of Good Urban Governance in the Upstream and Downstream Legal Documents of Iranian Development

Desirable urban governance is one of the most important indicators of sustainable urban development and is essential for the popularization of urban governance. The purpose of this study was to examine the upstream (constitutional) documents, the intermediate documents (the fourth and fifth five-year plans) and the downstream documents (municipal law) in order to find a desirable city-governed position in these laws. The method employed in this research was a qualitative Content Analysis Method which uses the tabular approach. In regards to desirable governance indicators in upstream and downstream legal documents, the results showed that, the more the fundamental laws of urban development, such as the Constitution, decrease to laws of lesser levels of importance, such Municipal Laws, the more the number of principles representing the criteria for good governance decrease. Also, analyzing the the timing of the fourth and fifth development plans shows that in the fifth plan, which was developed several years after the fourth plan, we were faced with an increase in the number of criteria that were viewed as the desired standard of good governance.