Post-Contentious Politics and Iran’s First Ecovillage

The existing scholarship on alternative institutional designs around
environmental issues mostly focuses on ideals, goals and practices of
these designs. It remains unclear under which circumstances these
initiatives emerge and expand. Moreover, those scholars who address
the emergence and expansion of these initiatives focus on examples
which are located in advanced industrialised societies. It remains unclear
why and how these alternative institutions emerge in non-industrialised
societies and countries which have not gone through the same growth
path as their advanced industrialised counterparts. Consequently,
transformative implication of these initiatives for broader social change
in non-advanced industrialised societies has not been explored. In this
paper, I show that in Iran the emergence of these alternative designs
should be understood within the context of post-contentious politics. I
present original research on a cooperative that embraces an alternative
lifestyle and whose aim is to create Iran’s first ecovillage. This case study
discusses one kind of response to the contraction of space for civil
society and environmental non governmental organisations in Iran. The
paper adds to our understanding of the interplay between
democratisation processes and environmental activism.