Foresight of the development of local planning of rural settlements with the approach of scenario planning Case study: East Azerbaijan province

 Planning the local development of rural communities is an effective technique, particularly for sustainable resource allocation, which might be the end objective of a happy future. Development planning should achieve intended goals from the perspective of all regional spatial stakeholders. Methodologies vary in response to new issues. Scenario writing of rural local planning in East Azerbaijan province was used to fill the study gap from two subject and methodological perspectives.

 The method of the present research is applied, descriptive-analytical, and mixed in terms of purpose, nature, and collection of information, respectively. Also, it is based on scenario planning. The panel consists of 30 experts and university professors in related fields. Scenario Wizard software extracted scenarios at three levels of consistent, strong, and weak probability.

  One strong scenario, 1675 weak scenarios, and 26 highly compatible scenarios were extracted. Each compatible scenario was displayed at three optimal, static, and critical probability levels.

 The scenario "encouraging local governance through popular participation" was identified as the first compatible scenario, which is positive and promising. "The lack of significant participation of people and non-governmental institutions in local planning," as the next consistent scenario, indicates the absence of stakeholders or at least the weak role of people in rural planning in the future. "Basic lack of attention to the role of intermediate cities" was identified as the third consistent scenario.

Innovation:

 Filling the research gap from the point of view of background criticism and all from the methodological aspect to provide stable scenario(s) for the future of local planning from the point of view of spatial stakeholders.