State against State: Re-reading Selseleh Regional Development Project

A decade-long extensive modernization in the 1960s under the title of White Revolution caused a group of the political elite in Iran to think of proposing an alternative model in the form of participatory development, which led to the formation of a number of projects in the early 1970s. One of these forgotten projects from that era is Selseleh Regional Development Project in Aleshtar, Lorestan.
Following the 1979 revolution, the process of delegating the governance to the public stopped and benefactors of these kinds of projects were transferred to the relevant governmental organizations. The Islamic-revolutionary government based its intended development programs on the same old top-down and nonparticipatory models in modernization.
One of the notable features of the Selseleh Project, which differentiates it from other participatory projects in the history of development in contemporary Iran is the particular cooperation of the state with experts along the process, as such the collaboration of government agents and the leftist groups with the long history of opposition to the government. My talk will explore the context of such intriguing collaborations between the monarchical state and the Left, as well as examines the possibilities of a delegation of governance to the public in contemporary Iran. This talk will contribute to an interactive research initiative entitled Re-reading the Experience of Selseleh Regional Project.