Rural Development in Iran: A Survey of Policies and Outcomes

This article examines secular changes in post-revolutionary rural Iran by focusing on rural social attitudes, social stratification, demography, morphology, and architecture. Offering a review of major rural reforms, it contends that although in the first two decades after the revolution, rural communities were primarily affected by state policies, they have been chiefly influenced by macro developments since then, nationally or globally. Rural change has been associated with the integration of the rural structure into the modern structure rather than adhering to the state-specific rural reforms and/or its ideological imperatives. The article concludes that such developments have resulted in greater access to modern amenities and paved the way for rural communities to adopt modern changes that were not necessarily on the government’s ideological agenda. Hence, the revolutionary objectives of an equal distribution of rural development benefits and combating rural poverty remain elusive.