Designing a Conceptual Model of Participatory Governance in Iran: A Grounded Theory Approach

Participatory governance is one of the successful approaches in the world in the field of governance. Surveys show that providing a participatory governance model following the religious foundations along with the cultural and social issues of the country will help a lot in solving governance challenges. The research purpose is to present a conceptual model of participatory governance in Iran based on the foundation's data analysis. The tool used to collect information in this study was a semi-structured interview that used the opinions of 27 experts in this field. The sampling method was purposeful. After collecting the data, based on the grounded theory method, the concepts are coded openly, centrally, and selectively. With the coding performed, 25 concepts were obtained which were classified into 5 categories: causal conditions, contextual conditions, intervening conditions, strategies, and consequences and are presented as a model for the central phenomenon of Participatory governance. The findings show factors such as not feeling the need for participatory governance and understanding its benefits, the distance between the elites and the people with the governing institutions and increasing tensions, weakness of collaborative work culture, weakness in reaching understanding and gathering opinions, inadequate understanding of people's behaviors and mental models and the different nature of governance in Islam and the West are the causal conditions of participatory governance. Also, factors such as increasing progress in the country, increasing cohesion in society, increasing justice in society, and increasing productivity in the country are the most important achievements of participatory governance in the country.