Local Participation Is Dead! Long Live Local Participation! (Part 1 – Tehran & Isfahan)
As Iranian urban activists express hopes for greater local participation, the Iranian government abolishes informal neighborhood associations
“I am not calling for democratic city planning. I am much more radical. I’m calling for city planning for democracy!”
I was startled to hear these words. They were not coming from some radical neighborhood collective here in New York City or in Seattle (although, realistically, from Seattle the call would have been for “socialism”). Rather it was a senior government official from Iran’s Ministry of Urban Development in Tehran, 6000 miles away from me. I was participating this past summer in a conference on the popular social media platform Clubhouse reviewing a new Iranian government initiative to incorporate neighborhood participation into the preparation of the “master plans” of the nation’s cities. (That I was participating in the three-hour virtual meeting on my smartphone while walking in Riverside Park raises interesting questions about the changing meaning of “local” in our globally interconnected world.) After years of often fruitless debate about how to improve the management of Iran’s cities beset by limited economic growth and job opportunities and widespread popular dissatisfaction sometimes turning into violent street protests, in 2018 the government announced official approval of what they dubbed a “novel approach” (ruikard novin) to how cities should prepare their “master plans”, the process of setting out goals for future urban growth and development.
The government official was explaining that henceforth any new plan must adopt a “participatory planning” approach which engaged all “stakeholders,” strengthened neighborhood institutions (taghviat nahadhaye mahali) and incorporated residents’ views and inputs solicited through neighborhood meetings. Iranian urban planners (mostly trained as architects or engineers) would now have to get up to speed and learn this community planning approach which involved how to be “facilitators” of public “deliberative” processes (ravesh gofte-gu mehvar). These criteria were written into the terms of reference of the government contracts sought by planning firms. Iran was tentatively experimenting with a model common in other countries of encouraging community or neighborhood-based participation. Listening, I thought of the anti-poverty program the US implemented in 1964, in which the federal government legally required local development programs to be “developed, conducted, and administered with the maximum feasible participation of residents.” The failure of that program and the legacy of skepticism about the feasibility and desirability of promoting forms of political participation beyond simply voting was at the forefront of my mind as I listened to the sometimes rancorous debate in Tehran. Would Iran confront the same traps, dilemmas, and frustrated expectations as many cities have done in the US and indeed in many developing countries around the world?
The first pilot project of the New Approach was promptly launched in 2019 to prepare the new master plan for Isfahan, Iran’s third largest city with a population of over 1.5 million. After two years and the completion of the first phase (consisting mostly, it seemed, of many neighborhood and stakeholder consultations) the virtual meeting I was listening to had brought together some of the key actors to assess the new approach so far. There seemed to be general consensus that the first phase had not been very successful. The country’s main professional association of urban planners had refused to endorse the Isfahan framework, arguing it was incoherent and technically flawed; other planners said that engaging with neighborhood residents, many of whom are unfamiliar with or ignorant of the complex technical dimensions of preparing a city plan that needed to consider regional even national dimensions, was a poor use of their time (“waste” was also used). Others said that, notwithstanding the lofty goals of the government’s “New Approach,” the reality was that the top-down control of most planning decisions meant that no real bottom-up, deliberative, or participatory approach could get off the ground. An independent urban economist hired by the municipality who had resigned in frustration complained that “the biggest obstacle to participation in this country is the government.” The chief planning consultant who had won the first phase contract seemed so disillusioned with the process that he said his firm would be unlikely to continue into the next phase of the project. On the other hand, the moderator of the panel pressed all present to see the glass as half full: finally, he said, someone in the government had decided to change the top-down approach to city planning and adopt a participatory approach, something intellectuals, advocates, and academics had been urging for decades; we have to start from somewhere, he opined.
Amid the genuinely interesting case of a central government ministry supporting the call for local democracy and “delegation to localities wherever possible,” the irony (or even the tensions) of a top-down government program to encourage bottom-up political and social participation seemed to be lost. Without the basic political and social rights necessary for the emergence of a robust plural civil society (meaning freedom of expression and assembly) able to formulate interests and grievances independent of the state, simply compiling statements from residents in numerous public neighborhood forums and charrettes hardly amounts to democratic decision making. It seemed it would likely increase the public’s dissatisfaction and skepticism.
The irony became more visible to me in a closely related, yet conflicting development taking place at about the same time. In July 2021, Iran’s highest court of administrative law (Divan Edalat) abolished the experiment with neighborhood participation that had started in Tehran almost two decades ago. The case concerned Tehran’s shurayari (“council helpers”), volunteer neighborhood committees with only advisory powers, but the ruling applied throughout the country. The Divan held that because volunteer members were selected via elections organized by the city council, the committees violated the constitution because neighborhoods committees are not specifically mentioned as public institutions that can be organized by means of elections. This appeared to leave open the slim possibility that neighborhood institutions reorganized on a different informal basis might be allowed to collaborate with the municipality, but for now the ruling has meant that neighborhood committees would no longer operate as part of the state’s intergovernmental framework. The 350 or so neighborhood committees in Tehran will therefore cease to function at the end of their current term, unless the parliament (Majlis) passes a law explicitly allowing them. Given all the concomitant implications of a new public institution, including electoral supervision, the vetting of candidates and so forth – the entire machinery of managed Islamic electoral authoritarianism (which I have written about elsewhere) – this seems highly unlikely. The neighborhood committees of other cities will also dissolve. This means the experiment for neighborhood participation, if not dead, is for now moribund.
The government’s move to abolish the elected neighborhood committees spurred a loose group of reformist neighborhood activists – urban professionals, architects, urbanists, social workers, academics, and writers, some secular, some religious - to organize a series of virtual public meetings on the Clubhouse social media platform on expanding and strengthening local participation in local decisions, from city planning to social services to bike lanes. While the implied criticism of the ruling government is mild, the meeting is risky for those in Iran, and it suggests the passion of these activists. Among the activists is a charismatic and energetic former aspirant for Tehran City Council whose optimism is touching if not convincing given her secular reformist profile. It is almost certain that she would fail to make it through the vetting process for candidates for elected office. Her prominence in these discussions about the potential of expanding local public participation in Iranian cities gave them a quixotic, unreal air. The low turnout in city council elections (which I’ve written about here) and now the elimination of even toothless advisory neighborhood committees makes it all seem all the more starry-eyed.
Why bother to control if no one shows up anyway?
Why the Iranian government abolished the neighborhood committees is unclear. My own experience (and research) indicates that the shurayari are hardly a threat to the regime’s preferred socio-political model of managed Islamic participatory governance (mardom salari deeni). The Iranian state has succeeded quite well in channeling political participation within the tightly restricted parameters laid down by the regime or nezam. And in practice many of these neighborhood groups may not have been very active. Over the fifteen years I lived in Tehran I don’t recall ever engaging with my neighborhood committee, and as far as I could tell no one I knew had any idea who the members of their local committee were. Even the most ardent advocates of the neighborhood councils concede that after twenty years of operation no more than a handful of people volunteer for the neighborhood committees. In the words of a woman who has been a leader in her traditional and religious neighborhood for many years, “only 4-5 old men from the mosque come to meetings in the shurayari.” She doubted that there are more than 10 persons in each district who are interested in participating and believes that her neighborhood is typical. One of the architects of the establishment of neighborhood councils in Tehran recently acknowledged in a public forum that the two-decade project of what he referred to as the “deliberative city” (goftegu shahri) “has not been very successful.” (Knowingly or not this was a reference to the influential western idea that defines the essence of a neighborhood as a “small territory [with a] capacity for deliberative democracy” to quote an influential 1969 book.) As one expert on decentralization with decades of experience across the developing world pointed out to me, this is a generalized problem. People like the idea of being consulted but then can’t be bothered to put the effort in to actually participate in the process or do so only when local issues have the potential to have some direct impact on their lives – mostly of the NIMBY variety. Economists have explained this by pointing to the (perverse) incentive structure built into local development: for local actors, the concentrated costs imposed at the household level usually obscures the diffuse benefits for the city as a whole, which makes the latter harder to recognize and mobilize around. It is easier to act to defeat something unwanted than to promote something desirable.
Seeing like a state
Yet the broader context in which the Isfahan decentralization experiment needs to be understood comes into focus when juxtaposed with the elimination of voluntary neighborhood committees. Authoritarian states such as Iran or China are not necessarily against all forms of political participation; but all participation must take place within the medium of the state and be controlled by it. In Iran the broader trend these days is the closing, not the opening of the space for political and social participation. The regime’s growing antipathy to demands to expand the scope of political participation is reflected in increasing concentration of power at the top the regime’s power hierarchy. The 2021 national elections were perhaps the first in which Iran’s leadership proffered arguments for the benefits of lower levels of electoral turnout; this marked a departure from the nezam’s usual authoritarian plebiscitary model of mobilizing the masses to vote.
The reality is that, as in all authoritarian regimes, only political participation that can be managed and controlled by the state is deemed acceptable. Chinese village elections are a paradigmatic example with some parallels to Iranian local elections: while local elections are permitted, the Chinese Communist Party wants its local party committee secretary to always win these village elections so that the mayor and the party secretary are the same person. Asked what happens when the interests of the Party conflicts with those of the villagers, one mayor involved in the Wukan protests explained, “they cannot conflict because by its nature the party represents the interests of the villagers. Their interests are the same.”
The appeal of local democracy: only in theory?
The idea of “grassroots democracy,” like the slogan “small is beautiful,” has an unobjectionable ring to it. Applied to large metropolitan cities like Tehran or NYC, grassroots democracy suggests that governing only through city-level institutions – mayors and city councils – is not enough to ensure efficiency, responsiveness, or legitimacy of government. Mayors and some city councils take the city wide view (as they should) but, absent links to smaller jurisdictions making up the city, they can lack the sensitivity to respond to neighborhood concerns – yet that is where the impacts of urbanization and many local government decisions are most acutely felt. Popular pressure to include more direct input from residents of neighborhoods in key decisions about what gets built and where and how the costs are distributed exists in authoritarian societies as well as pluralistic and democratic ones. If mechanisms to accommodate bargaining, deliberation, or voting between diverse interests are absent, compromise becomes elusive and local grievances over land use can escalate into protests. (Clashing interests could be either between government and society – as in cases of urban renewal that displace households – or between competing private interests such as between developers and residents or both at the same time.) This can threaten social order and discourage needed investments, undermining the legitimacy of the governing model, lowering the attractiveness of the city as a place to work and live.
Yet despite the general acknowledgment by some technocrats and some social activists of the potential benefits of neighborhood participation in urban governance, the disbanding of Tehran’s neighborhood councils and the plan to obtain local input on projects in Isfahan suggests that to even have a chance for success, local participation must first be valued as part of the broader social contract in which civil society both cooperates with but also limits state power. Absent the broader context of the reciprocal influence of society on the state, experiments in grassroots participation will be either fragile and ephemeral or become an instrument of the top-down administration of local areas. The Iranian state seem to be saying yes to local participation, but only on its own terms.
The call for greater local participation in Iran, however meager its impact on policy might be interpreted as a way to combat authoritarianism (often referred to in Iran as despotism or estebdad); in other words a practical response to the worry embodied in the claim that “The essence of despotism [is] the inability of society to organize and influence policy making outside the hierarchy of the state.” That’s the theory at any rate. (Whether greater local participation is part of a broader movement advocating local democracy is a contingent question. Observers of sometimes contentious village elections in China doubt this; in Iran reformists in the 2000s claimed this; Iranian NGOS and activists today know better than to explicitly articulate this in a public forum.)
But does local democracy really work in practice?
There are reasons to be skeptical about local participation’s capacity to strengthen civil society and about ordinary residents’ willingness and capacity to become engaged in local politics beyond their narrow self-interest and involved in local governance beyond voting. The more-than-half century US experience provides plenty of evidence for skepticism. In many instances formalizing the role of neighborhoods in city governance has led to excessive parochialism, NIMBYism, biased or unrepresentative participation, and local capture by local interest groups with adverse impacts on, for example, availability of affordable housing. Political ignorance is widespread (even if “rational”), and public opinion can be distorted by a variety of cognitive biases and perverse incentives associated with political economy of urban development. Other critics decried too much participation as destabilizing and overburdening representative government and undermining government legitimacy. And neighbors may in fact have little interest in being drafted into administrative or political roles assisting the government and other experts in managing the city, or acting as political agents of change aligned with political parties; they may prefer to preserve the ad hoc connections based around informal, passive interactions around mutual help that are not explicitly political or administrative. Anecdotal evidence and my experience of Iranian cities supports the latter contention.
Of course none of these challenges of making local democracy work justifies the whole scale abandonment of the democratic ideals in favor of systems of technocracy, paternalism or guardianship for cities or for society as a whole. The discussions taking place in Iran around urban citizenship do reprise many of the assumptions of the US experience mentioned earlier, and may well encounter many of the same problems and challenges. Yet seen from the vantage point of the US and other western experience, the distinctiveness of the Iranian case clearly comes into view: the normative meaning of political or social forms of participation. In open societies whose basic assumptions embodied in civil and political rights are more or less settled, the challenges concern how to balance the competing objectives of participation and governance efficiency inside or within the liberal democratic framework. How to navigate these contrasts and different tensions is a perennial and unavoidable challenge whether in Tehran or NY. The work of local democracy is never done. In Iran by contrast the main battle is between the reigning authoritarian Islamist forms of participation and a democratic pluralist alternative which is currently almost entirely marginal and can only be implicitly articulated as such.
In part two, I will contrast Iran’s experience with neighborhood participation with what I have observed in New York to highlight the different set of conundrums that confront societies that have accepted the value of pluralism but nonetheless face problems of making local democracy work.