The effect of governmental support on sustainable rural development (Case studies: Shahin Shahr and Meymeh villages)

Governments have made many efforts in rural development by implementing various economic, socio-cultural, and physical policies and actions; however, it seems that these policies and actions have not been able to provide rural settlements for sustainable development. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to investigate the effect of governmental support on sustainable rural development in Shahin Shahr and Meymeh villages. This is an applied research which employs field descriptivesurvey as a method. The statistical population consists of approximately 2834head of households. The statistical sample includes 338 head of households that have been selected based on Cochran formula. Available sampling method have been applied as a sampling method technique. The data collection tool is a questionnaire. The questioner has been divided into two sections: government support with 14 items and sustainable rural development with 29 items. To analyze the collected data Structural Equation Path Analysis and Friedman test have been adopted by using AMOS and SPSS-22 software. The results indicate that, government supports, including socio-cultural, environmental, and economic supports, have a positive effect on sustainable rural development. Furthermore, government supports have the largest effect on environmental indicators and the least effect on economic indicators.