A high-energy (0.5-3.0 TeV centre of mass) electron-positron Compact Linear Collider (CLIC) is being studied at CERN as a new physics facility. The design study has been optimized for 3 TeV centre-of-mass energy. Intense bunches injected into the main linac must have unprecedentedly small emittances to achieve the design luminosity 1035cm-2s-1 required for the physics experiments. The positron and electron bunch trains will be provided by the CLIC injection complex. This thesis describes an optics design and performance of a positron damping ring developed for producing such ultra-low emittance beam. The linear optics of the CLIC damping ring is optimized by taking into account the combined action of radiation damping, quantum excitation and intrabeam scattering. The required beam emittance is obtained by using a TME (Theoretical Minimum Emittance) lattice with compact arcs and short period wiggler magnets located in dispersion-free regions. The damping ring beam energy is chosen as 2.42 GeV. The lattice features small values of the optical functions, a large number of compact TME cells, and a large number of wiggler magnets. Strong sextupole magnets are needed for the chromatic correction which introduces significant nonlinearities, decreasing the dynamic aperture. The nonlinear optimization of the lattice is described. An appropriate scheme of chromaticity correction is determined that gives reasonable dynamic aperture and zero chromaticity. The nonlinearities induced by the short period wiggler magnets and their influence on the beam dynamics are also studied. In addition, approaches for absorption of synchrotron radiation power produced by the wigglers are discussed. Realistic misalignments of magnets and monitors increase the equilibrium emittance. The sensitivity of the CLIC damping ring to various kinds of alignment errors is studied. Without any correction, fairly small vertical misalignments of the quadrupoles and, in particular, the sextupoles, introduce unacceptable distortions of the closed orbit as well as intolerable spurious vertical dispersion and coupling due to the strong focusing optics of the damping ring. A sophisticated beam-based correction scheme has been developed in order to bring the design target emittances and the dynamic aperture back to the ideal value. The correction using dipolar correctors and several skew quadrupole correctors allows a minimization of the closed-orbit distortion, the cross-talk between vertical and horizontal closed orbits, the residual vertical dispersion and the betatron tune coupling. The small emittance, short bunch length, and high current in the CLIC damping ring could give rise to collective effects which degrade the quality of the extracted beam. A number of possible instabilities and an estimate of their impact on the ring performance are briefly surveyed. The effects considered include fast beam-ion instability, coherent synchrotron radiation, Touschek scattering, intrabeam scattering, resistive-wall wake fields, and electron cloud.