On May 10, Iran’s Interior Minister Abdolreza Rahmani Fazli proclaimed that his ministry had established a working group to review the potential of dividing the country into new administrative regions. While announcing this task, Rahmani Fazli underlined that this work “would not mean that the current administrative structures would be unsettled.”

In February, the Majles Research Center (MRC) published a report stating: “The current administrative structures in Iran are an inefficient framework … which not only have not contributed to the country’s development, but have caused an imbalanced development pattern.” In that report, the MRC produced a number of recommendations that focused on decentralization and the creation of new administrative regions based on economic, geographic, cultural, political, social and historical parameters.

The discourse had started in December 2013, when the government proposed an amendment to the 1983 law on administrative structures. These debates have now led to the proposal by the interior minister to introduce new administrative regions. The government seems to be planning the creation of new regions in consideration of “cultural, social, economic and security parameters.” Current provinces would be clustered together and regional governance structures would be created and according to the minister, “some of the government responsibilities would be transferred” to them. Rahmani Fazli outlined, “If instead of having five or six provincial governors, we would have one regional governor, that regional governor could participate and contribute to decision-making on a national level.” Furthermore, the interior minister pointed to the imbalances in the country’s regional development, which he sees as a consequence of the current administrative and governance structures.

This is evidently an encouraging sign of theoretical steps toward decentralizing political power in a meaningful way. In fact, for decades, experts and intellectuals had criticized the existing division of the country along ethnic lines as counterproductive in decentralizing power, creating competition between ethnic groups as opposed to administrative regions.