Iranian Village Shapes a Model Of Democracy
Breaking Tradition, Residents Take Charge of Own Destiny

By John Ward Anderson
Washington Post Foreign Service

Sunday, September 2, 2001, front page
© 2001 The Washington Post Company

Photos by the author

LAZOOR, Iran -- There are no battles between reformers and conservatives, mullahs and secularists in this small, mountainous farming community south of the Caspian Sea.

Here, in contrast to most other places in Iran, grass-roots democracy is flourishing. Young and old, men and women decide together how to run their affairs, and no one overrules them.

Three hours and 75 miles west, in Iran's capital, Tehran, reformist politicians and religious conservatives are battling over how to govern the country -- as an authoritarian theocracy, a liberal democracy, or some combination of the two. Youths testing the limits of social freedoms are being flogged in public, political dissidents are being jailed and liberal newspapers are being closed.

But in Lazoor, the people run the show, and ideology has yielded to practicality and the common craving for a better life. Two years after winning permission to form a local government, and after participating in classes to encourage local decision-making, success here is measured not only in how the town looks -- and the changes are substantial -- but in how the residents feel.

"The most important impact is that people are really self-confident, and they have started to believe in themselves," said community leader Ali Esfandiar. "We are capable of finding solutions for every problem."

That approach has infected the entire town, transforming Lazoor's system of government, the local economy, long-standing social customs and personal attitudes, and the management and protection of the environment, which is critical in any farming community. Private aid officials say that the way Lazoor has solidified local democracy and decision-making, boosted the influence and self-esteem of women, empowered the young and created job opportunities could be a model for developing and managing three-quarters of Iran's rural areas -- helping stem the flight of young people to cities.

"The[central] government does not know its own role and level of participation in Lazoor, and the people still do not know what authority they have," said Zia Eddin Almassi, a community development consultant who began working in Lazoor four years ago, when Iran's Agriculture Ministry and the U.N. Development Program launched a joint effort to encourage citizen participation in managing natural resources. "But this project has proven that people are capable of making their own decisions," he said, "and that the government believes people can manage their own affairs."

The results are concrete. The 3,000 residents elect their leaders and tax themselves. In the last two years, they have analyzed their problems, from the low status of women to seasonal flooding, and they have devised and implemented solutions, from sensitivity exercises for men to the construction of mountainside terraces to control erosion. More than 1,000 townspeople labored nine months to build 42 dams to control floods that regularly devastated the village.

They planted 6,700 fruit trees on hillsides overlooking the town, watered by a new spring-fed containment pond, and they plan to create a large community garden for medicinal plants. They reseeded about 40 acres denuded by generations of overgrazing. They built a new mortuary, town dump and community bath. They began weekly courses in weaving and chicken breeding, with an animal expert provided by the central government. They upgraded the heating and water systems of the town's main mosque. They recently began rebuilding about 18 miles of irrigation canals that are the lifeline of Lazoor's agrarian economy.

Most extraordinary was the change in attitude between men and women, as symbolized by mixed-group organizational meetings in the local mosque, where women previously were required to sit separately behind a screen, said Khadija Catherine Razavi, an activist from Tehran who helped mobilize the community to start doing things for itself.

"Up until then, the only thing a man had to say to a woman in a mosque was, 'Shut your kid up,' " she said. But men were encouraged to consider the role of women in Lazoor and to write down the challenges they faced, "and suddenly there was a very new tone. The men were saying: 'Women are wonderful. If all the men leave Lazoor, nothing will happen, but if even one woman leaves, we will go into a deep winter's sleep.' "

Many residents say women still need greater representation on local councils that make the most crucial decisions. "In my opinion, 80 percent of the work here is done by women, and those who work must be fully empowered," said Alireza Shoja. He was surrounded by a group of 10 men who shouted "Yes!" in chorus.

State banking officials were so impressed with the town's industriousness -- and so swayed by the lobbying of local leaders -- that they recently opened Lazoor's first bank branch, so people no longer had to travel 30 miles to pay their utility bills. In less than a month, the bank manager said, residents had opened about 300 personal savings accounts, and he had approved several hundred small loans, ranging from $600 to $1,200.

This was how the leaders of Iran envisioned the country would work when they wrote the new constitution 22 years ago in the aftermath of the 1979 Islamic revolution, political analysts say. The constitution called for layering of elected local, regional and provincial governments that would concentrate power in the hands of the people. It was to be a model of bottom-up decision-making.

That concept got lost, analysts say, during two decades of legislative inertia that began with Iran's 1980-88 war with Iraq. People accustomed to having the central government provide for them did not demand the local elections that were due them.

But the government began a decentralization drive in the mid-1990s, and after his landslide election in 1997, reformist President Mohammad Khatami ushered in Iran's first local elections in February 1999. Voters in 730 cities and 40,000 villages elected about 200,000 local council members, including more than 500 women.

Today, analysts agree that Lazoor's success is an exception. They say that most local councils have yet to realize the dream of making their communities masters of their own destinies.

Laws establishing the councils do not give the bodies enough power, experts say. Because they have little taxing authority, councils still rely on the central government for funding, and lack money for their own priorities. Their links to agencies in Tehran and the provincial capitals are weak, and many government bureaucrats have refused to relinquish their planning and decision-making authority. In rural areas, many villages simply elected their traditional elders as councilmen, and they lack experience, education and management skills.

Some urban councils, particularly the reformist-dominated Tehran city council, have been plagued by factional battles with other institutions controlled by religious conservatives. In fact, the chairman of the Tehran council was gravely wounded in an assassination attempt, and another popular member was jailed for five years.

The battles are similar to ones being fought at a higher level between the elected, administrative side of Iran's state, which is dominated by reformers, and the appointed, Islamic side, which is controlled by religious conservatives. Some analysts indicate that future legislation to grant more power to local councils may be vetoed by hard-liners, who favor a strict, hierarchal Islamic government unencumbered by elections.

But in Lazoor, there is a sort of fairy-tale quality to what has occurred -- as if the patient who a few years ago couldn't walk has suddenly become an Olympic track star.

It began four years ago when two people in the town, a young man and woman designated Lazoor's "animators," were selected to attend a two-month training program for people from eight villages -- a crash course in how to make decisions, particularly in crafting solutions to local problems.

It was a skill, residents here said, that had been lost in the generations during which first Iran's monarchy and then the national government had assumed full responsibility for addressing community needs. As a result, they said, people forgot how to provide for themselves and communities became dysfunctional, while the central government typically ignored local problems or, when flush with oil money, mandated solutions that were inappropriate because the community was not consulted.

The animators returned home and organized local workshops and training seminars. They formed a 75-person steering committee, including 15 women, to tap more closely into community concerns. They mapped the surrounding area and, with the help of government engineers, analyzed water runoff and flood trends. Week after week, the entire town was urged to attend nightly meetings and air grievances. Sometimes hundreds of people showed up.

"It used to be that the government imposed programs from above, and now the people had a chance to design programs to suit their own needs," said Shokat Esfandiar, Lazoor's 24-year-old female animator. "Women in particular heard, 'The men will take care of it,' but now it is women who are proposing changes. They are much better at figuring out what to do with their own lives."

After months of discussion, the community drew up a list of 81 problems -- enshrined on three posters -- including the lack of a library, senior high school, women's clinic and women's sports facility.

But many of the grievances sought to change the traditions and attitudes typically found in rural Islamic communities. Youths demanded more support from their elders. Women deserved more say in the town's affairs, the posters declared, and traditional conventions that prevented them from speaking their minds needed to be eased.

"Traditionally, all of the decisions were made by a small group of elders, so the youth went to them and asked for permission to participate in our own destiny and decisions," said the male animator, community leader Ali Esfandiar, also 24, who shares the same last name as his female counterpart but is not closely related. "This was our greatest success."

Two and a half years ago, as Lazoor was ending the planning phase, the community elected its first five-man local council, which gave the village additional legal authority and a more streamlined process to begin implementing changes. Since then, it has started tackling the 81 most pressing problems systematically and completed work on perhaps half a dozen, as well as several related issues, said Zakaria Shoja, a soft-spoken school administrator who heads the village council.

"There's a lot yet that needs to be done and a lot of awareness that needs to be brought about, but the mood of true democracy is going to be realized here in its entirety," he said. "We plan to create a new world, relying on our own power and capabilities."


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Lazoor is cited in the World Resources Institute's 2005 Earth Trends report:  How Community-Based Resource Management Can Benefit the Poor.    A significant quote:  "Community-based natural resource management ...has sometimes spurred significant social change within the community itself, such that villagers gradually become less deferential to existing leaders and eventually may replace under-performing managers who serve their own self-interest rather than the interests of the community as a whole."