Evaluation and Prioritization of District Good Governance (Case Study: 9th District of Tehran)

پژوهش ‎های جغرافیای سیاسی

Article 1, Volume 2, Issue 3 - Serial Number 6, October 2017, Pages 1-23   

Document Type: مقالات علمی -پژوهشی

DOI: 10.22067/pg.v2i6.61805

Authors

Safar Ghaedrahmati^* ; Seyed Ali Alavi; Shaharm Bazrafkan

Tarbiat Modares University

Abstract

Extended Abstract
1. Introduction
The realization of good urban governance in urban management of metropolitans in Iran, including Tehran, requires the realization of citizens’ participation in a variety of dimensions. This emphasizes on the concepts such as justice-orientation, legality, transparency, consensus-orientation, participation, efficiency and effectiveness, accountability and responsibility. Due to the fact that the management of the district 9 like other urban districts of Tehran is at a low level, it seems that this district requires a new and more dynamic management system to be improved.
In this research, the neighborhoods of the 9th district of Tehran have been considered in terms of important indicators of urban good governance. Using the VIKOR ranking technique, we have studied the position of these indicators. Therefore, the main goal of this study is to evaluate the eight neighborhoods of district 9 and prioritize neighborhoods based on urban good governance indicators. For this purpose, firstly, using the available literature on urban governance, various dimensions of the subject are described with emphasis on urban neighborhoods, and then, on this basis, appropriate indicators for measuring urban good governance are extracted. In the following, a suitable tool for gathering proportionate data with the indicators has been designed. As the field study has been carried out, the resulted data are analyzed using VIKOR model.
2. Methodology
The general approach of the research is a quantitative method. It is based on documentation and field study (questionnaire) in terms of data gathering. First, related studies are used to identify urban good governance indicators. Accordingly, eight important indicators were identified in this field and considered for designing the questionnaire as the main tool of research in the field study.
To increase the validity, the content and visual validity methods have been used. In this regard, the validity of the research tool was confirmed by a number of experts in this field. Then, Cronbach's alpha technique was used to measure the reliability of research tool. The number of 0.835 was obtained, which indicates the appropriate reliability of the research tool. According to Cochran's formula, 384 questionnaires in eight neighborhoods of 9th district of Tehran were distributed by stratified random sampling. Finally, the VIKOR decision model was used to analyze the collected data derived from field surveys.
3. Results and Discussion
This research aims to measure urban good governance indicators in Tehran's neighborhoods. In this regard, based on the available survey literature in the field of urban good governance, 39 items in the form of eight indicators of urban good governance including participation, justice-oriented, consensus-oriented, efficiency and effectiveness, transparency, legality, accountability and responsibility have been examined in an analysis framework of VIKOR model.
The results show that the neighborhoods of the 9th district of Tehran have a different situation in terms of urban good governance indicators. As Table 12 shows, these indicators have generally a better status in Dr Hooshyar and Ostad Moein with the coefficients of 0.093 and 0.252, respectively. Fatah neighborhood is in the worst status with the coefficient of 0.810. This indicates a significant difference between the neighborhoods in terms of urban good governance. And the rest of other neighborhoods of 9th district of Tehran have a coefficient between 0.3 and 0.7.
4. Conclusion
According to the findings, the centralized and top-down management of authorities and urban managers in the studied neighborhoods, vertical relations and hierarchy, lack of attention to local and civil institutions, discrimination in laws and regulations, and finally, lack of attention to the strategy of community development as the basis and participatory development foundation are remarkable in these neighborhoods. The goal of participatory development foundation is to pay attention to a citizen as a responsible and active member in the urban society to encourage collaboration for promoting standards of the life.
The strategy of urban good governance aims to create a democratic process for flourishing a foundation for social life based on more participation of people, collective responsibility and the delegation of authority to the local community in order to improve the quality of life. In addition, focusing on the ability of the local community and their direct role in the development process, this strategy seeks to find a type of management based on the local community through collaboration of government and nongovernmental organizations, while unfortunately, these indicators are not considered comprehensively in the studied neighborhoods, and “the right of human development and places” has been ignored.
Also, the indicator of accountability was lower than the average, indicating that the respondents did not consider this indicator in desirable status in their district. They believe that the authorities and urban (district) managers should be responsible and accountable to their results, decisions and activities and should be responsive about their decisions to the urban (district) residents. They did not consider their authorities responsive to accomplished or accomplishing activities. This status is not observed in studied neighborhoods.

Keywords

Political geography of cities; Good urban governance; Urban neighborhoods

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