Mechanisms and Rules Governing the Lock-in of Regional Development in Khuzestan Province of Iran

The debate on planning and development to achieve it has always been a serious concern of the country. However, in spite of the efforts conducted, regional development has been associated with plenty of locks-in and barriers. The question of this article is why the Khuzestan region faces long-standing problems despite its abundant resources and high development capacity. To answer this question, a model of a productive mechanism has been developed based on an idea, so that if these mechanisms are present and act as expected, then the reasons for the events and the current situation in the region will be explained. This paper has used reproductive logic within the frame of critical realism paradigm. It has a critical look at the subject in addition to the explanation. The explanatory model of this research has a core (the concept of extraction) that has created five other concepts (environmental drainage, economic monopoly; the center’s dominance in the same time the delegation of authorities from a political point of view; cultural dependence and social fiction with a zero-sum altogether from the social point of view). They, in aggregate, have formed the basis of regional development and the dominance of this thinking in the planning of the region over the past few decades, the mechanisms and rules that have been governing the lock-in and barriers of regional development. To address this problem, it is necessary to pay attention to integrated planning and change the extractive thinking in regional and national policy-making, planning and management.