analyzing the governance structure of sustainable development in deprived areas using social network analysis

Development planning in Iran has been considered in the past, but has not made much progress in terms of balanced development and attention to regional justice. Lack of appropriate conditions for governing regional development is the reason for the failure of balanced regional development policies in Iran from the perspective of institutional approach. The present study aimed at evaluating and analyzing the governance structure of development for deprived areas of the country according to the laws and legal duties of the Sixth Economic and Social Development Plan. The cooperation network was analyzed based on the legal duties of the institutions and organizations in charge of sustainable and balanced development programs in the regions using Ucinet and Netdraw software as to the indicators of degree centrality, betweenness centrality, density, geodetic distance and cutting points. The results show that the lack of a regional development management system, the absence of a definition of executive and supervisory institutions, and the nonexistence of attention to regional potentials, indigenous human capital knowledge and local entrepreneurship development are the main challenges of regional development governance structure. Due to the imbalance in distribution of power among the key the stakeholders in the current structure, development of cooperation between provincial planners and other key actors, identifying the regional development roadmap, strengthening the legislative role of parliament, the oversight role of the Environmental Protection Organization, and the participatory role of communities local development are counted as the capacities of balanced regional development governance in the country.