Identification of provinces of Islamic Republic of Iran’s local self-government preventing factors

The formation of various ministries and the establishment of organizations and institutions in the national and provincial levels have made the Islamic Republic of Iran a giant service provider regime (Alimoradi et al., 2017). Performing such activities through the de-concentrated organizing pattern of provinces will threaten the country with declining productivity, undermining local sovereignty, promoting ethnic nationalism, and formation of religious militant motives (Omidi, 2013). Policymakers have been seeking to establish a decentralized model for organizing Iran's government in recent decades, but have always failed to implement decentralization policies (Alimoradi et al., 2018). The main purpose of the present research is to identify preventing factors of local self-governing of Iran provinces.

Theoretical Frame work:

There is little research on the factors that preventing local self-government. Maykova and Simonova (2015) identified factors such as lack of maturity of local government, the inclusive patriarchal attitude of the authorities, people's preference for strong central government, poor citizen participation, belief in citizen are ineffectiveness on the local self-government activities, low trust in the local self-government, and lack of citizen awareness of the opportunities for participation in local self-government. Also moving toward local self-government is influenced by the leaders' political will to change the situation, expert knowledge on defining goals, determining the path to achieve goals, public support, and citizens' desire to change and prepare people to implement local self-government (Kobasa, 2012). Some research has also emphasized the impact of ICT on local government by reducing bureaucracy and strengthening democracy (Kumar et al., 2013).

Due to the unbalanced development of the provinces, high ethnic diversity, mosaicity of the country, the existence of security threats due to the geopolitical situation of Iran, and the lack of adequate and appropriate theoretical foundations, in this research, content analysis has been used to formulating local self-government capacity model in Iran (Creswell, 2012:423). In this regard, 16 experts have been interviewed. During the process of coding and analyzing interviews data, 560 items, 430 indications, 105 conceptual codes, 17 categories were identified. By analyzing the results of the interviews through an interpretative method, 7 preventing factors included; “Elite poverty”, "Political contradiction", "Citizens' inability", “Ethnicity provocation”, “Unbalanced development”, “International threats”, “Internal threat” were identified. In order to quantitatively test the model, the researcher designed a questionnaire with 98 questions and collected data at the provincial level. Due to the few members of the statistical population (31 provinces), quantitative data analysis was performed using partial least squares (PLS-SME) using PLS software.The dimensions of the extracted model from the grounded theory method are elite excellence, political convergence, citizenship excellence, legal identity, democracy, government duties, decision-making powers, public organizations, external threats, lack of development, ethnic gravitation, internal security threats, public vitality, income sustainability, communalism strength, economic agility, law respect, efficiency in providing services and strength domestic governance. The researcher, through a quantitative test, increases the credibility and validity of the local self-government capacity model and confirms the findings of the research.

The value of the goodness of fit (GOF) is 0.78, which indicates a strong overall fit of the model. In the following, 18 hypotheses of research, which were created based on the findings of the interpretative method, were tested. The results of the study of the significance of the paths between the variables of the local self-government model in the provinces level of Iran could not reject 3 hypotheses. 6 other hypotheses have been rejected because of the fundamental differences between members of the small statistical community. The results of the structural equation calculations show that the categories of "desire to retain power by the authorities", "intellectual and practical failure of leaders", "citizen-mindedness", "individualism and non-citizen participation", "citizen irresponsibility", "lack of technical infrastructure" and "facilities limitation" prevent the self-governing of Iran provincesIt should be noted that the present study had some limitations such as ignoring the impact of local self-government preventing factors on legal identity. Since the legal identity of all provinces is the same, this element was removed from the structural equation model because it had no variance. Another limitation of the study was the elimination of the category of partisanship. The weakness of partisanship at the provincial level eliminated this category from the structural equation model.
 

Conclusions and Suggestions:

Unbalanced development of provinces and sanctions are disrupting the government duties. Identifying business capacities in the province and creating the necessary conditions for the presence of the private sector are among the strategies to enhance the capacity of the provinces to attract more tasks from the center.The desire to retain power by the authorities, the intellectual and practical disruption of leaders, and the presence of an overwhelming ethnic majority affect decision-making powers. Attracting the support of all national and provincial authorities to recognize the province's independence is one of the strategies to strengthen decision-making powers at the provincial level.Sanctions and the lack of technical infrastructure in some provinces, affect the pioneering of public organizations in technology. Reengineering, pathology, and continuous improvement of processes, eliminating parallel public sector executive activities and assisting the central government to distribute facilities fairly across provinces are among the measures taken to develop public organizations. Desires to retain power by authorities, individualism, non-participation and irresponsibility of citizens, ethnic excitement, Western divisive policies and threats to domestic security are among the factors that threaten democracy of provinces self-governing. Therefore, this strategy are suggested to reduce the problems of democracy: strengthen common religious values and emphasize Iranian and Islamic identity, develop participatory decision-making capacity, respect the rights of others in government, civil society and the private sector, and support local religious and political leaders.Political conflict, ethnic excitement, and domestic and international security threats are factors that preventing of formation of legal identity of self-governing provinces with the aforementioned characteristics. It is suggested increase understanding among stakeholders by holding conferences and discussions among scholars, policymakers and officials about local self-government and increasing interactions between central and local government.