Golden Key to Modernity? Genealogy of Grand Development Projects in Iran

This paper is a critical, comparative, historical analysis of a succession of spectacular grand development projects conceptualized and implemented by Iran’s central state since early 20th Century, with the promise of delivering a golden age of modernity and development. The case studies include the Trans-Iranian Railroad, the multi-purpose Dez Development Project, Isfahan’s Iron Smelting Compound, Khuzestan’s Sugar Cane Development Project, and the Nuclear Energy Program. These projects have straddled the rival political regimes of Pahlavi Monarchy and Islamic republic. Their scale and complexity came to symbolize the state’s will to overcome a perceived backwardness and dependence, and to act as a rapid pathway to prosperity, national independence, and a guarantee to a deserved high status among advanced nations. At inception, all these spectacular projects were highly contested. They stretched public and social resources to the limit, and has significant consequences for local societies. Their implementation was often violent, and adversely affected populations and environments. Virtually none performed as promised, economically, but they continued to be referred to as models. Paradoxically, overtime, the practice and politics of conceptualizing and implementing these white elephants has been embraced by successive political regimes and the technical experts responsible for them, and used to mobilize popular support and to fan sentiments of national grandeur. This paper investigates the genealogy of these grand projects, the social actors who championed them, and the social and spatial consequences of their implementation. It documents the material conditions that allowed their conceptualizations, and documents the resistance, rivalries, and obstacles that faced their implementation. It evaluates the material, economic, social, spatial, and environmental consequences of the projects, and the extent to which they accomplished their lofty initial promises. The paper concludes that these projects seem to reflect the discursive and material power struggles and alliances among rival factions of technical experts and political actors, rather than accomplish the miraculous pathway to a promised modernity that was at their inception.