Involving different strata of rural people in socio-economic and developmental activities has been one of the main objective of the post-revolutionary developmental policies. In this paper an attempt has been made to examine the impact of the post-revolutionary rural reforms on the participation of rural people in the process of rural change in selected villages of the province of Eastern Azerbaijan. The paper concludes that firstly, the villages with maximum rural programmes, with higher developmental conditions, and the villagers with higher socio-economic backgrounds participated highly in the process of rural development; secondly, despite the positive impact of rural programmes in enhancing rural participation, the involvement of rural people remains far from the objectives of rural programmes, mainly due to the pre-existing socio economic structures, the centralised characteristics of rural development programmes and the lack of appropriate organizations at village level.
)