Coercive policy approach in the environmental legislation in Iran

The contract-based environmental governance model was the first systematic attempt to implement environmental guidelines and the routine activities of the government, which led to the adoption of policies and environmental regulation with command-and-control strategies in 1960. Since the 1980s, there have been calls for increased flexibility in environmental regulation, and many states have used more flexible ideological and managerial strategies in policy-making. Given that the occurrence of the Islamic Revolution and the Sazandegi era was the beginning of the modernization of environmental regulation in the country, this paper tries to show the governing environmental approaches to environmental regulation by focusing on Hobbes’ political theory and using qualitative content analysis. The results showed that despite the Islamic Revolution and the differences between governments after the Islamic Revolution, the legislature focused on using traditional command-and-control strategies. In other words, the priority given in the country’s environmental regulation is to implement coercive policy under Hobbes’ political theory. Hence, the environmental governance governing Iran’s environmental regulation can be considered the contract-based environmental governance model.