Restorative nodes of governance in the Anthropocene: Iran's Kashaf River

Abstract

Environmental collapse along the Kashaf River in Iran is about desertification, climate change and heavy metal pollution. The river concentrates a nest of intertwined crises about urban squatters, drugs, crime, public health, marginalization, state and city planning and threats to the legitimacy and survival of the state itself. Five Clifford Shearing ideas are woven into the theoretical fabric of the article: nodal governance; regulatory culture as a storybook (rather than a rulebook); justice as a better future; and AMP – networked discovery of Awareness, Motivation and Pathways for transformation; and a green ethic of care to guide transformation. These microdynamics arise in a Kashaf River imaginary that different societies might learn from. They involve nodes of local governance organized by front-line workers who restoried intertwined problems with an ethic of care. The challenge is that restorative micro-strategies proved promising when steering powerless actors, but frayed when faced with factory owners. More aggressive strategies of policycentric governance are needed for responsive escalation to confront privilege. Yet they too may be more creatively escalated nodes of conversational regulation. Multi-level response to a multi-level problem by multi-level governance is the topic of this paper. Ultimately, it grapples with what kinds of institutions of regulation are needed for multi-level responses to polycentric problems. It first documents a crisis of river pollution on the Kashaf River near Mashad, Iran and diagnoses the intersection of this with larger crises of regional water depletion and global warming. The river is drying up and suffering catastrophic heavy metal pollution (Sheikh et al. 2013). It proves not only an environmentally wicked problem, but socially and politically complex. The article proceeds by first narrating the unfolding layers of crisis. Then it catalogues different layers of regulatory failure across several decades. Finally some decisive moments of transformation of the regulatory storybook for the Kashaf River are considered. This transformation grows significantly from the nodal leadership of a 1 This paper is part of a Linkage project between the Environment Protection Authority (Victoria, Australia) and RegNet at the Australian National University that is funded by the Australian Research Council. 2 Kashafrood or Kashafrud is a river that flows from the Hezar Mountains in Razavi Khorasan Province in northeast of Iran. After passing near the cities of Radkanand Chenaran in Razavi Khorasan Province and then north and east to Mashhad, the Kashf River joins the Harirud River at the frontier of Iran and Turkmenistan. It flows for 240 km. Marshad is the main city on the river and Tus is another important urban centre on the river. Electronic copy available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3439910