Restorative nodes of governance in the Anthropocene: Iran's Kashaf River

• Published date: 01 July 2021
• Author: John Braithwaite,Honeye Hojabrosadati,Miranda Forsyth
• Date: 01 July 2021
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/lapo.12173

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Restorative nodes of governance in the Anthropocene:

Iran’s Kashaf River

John Braithwaite

1

| Honeye Hojabrosadati

2

| Miranda Forsyth

1

1

School of Regulation and Global Governance

(RegNet), ANU College of Asia and the

Pacific, Australian National University,

Canberra, Australian Capital Territory,

Australia

2

Islamic Azad University of Mashhad,

Mashhad, Iran

Correspondence

John Braithwaite, School of Regulation and

Global Governance (RegNet), ANU College

of Asia and the Pacific, Australian National

University, Canberra, ACT 0200, Australia.

Email: john.braithwaite@anu.edu.au

Abstract

This article describes an environmental crisis in Iran

that is actually a multidimensional crisis of law and

policy. The article explores the restorative nodal gov-

ernance response to such polycentric problems by

weaving together five related ideas originating from

criminologist and regulatory scholar Clifford Shear-

ing: nodal governance; regulatory culture as a story-

book (rather than a rulebook); justice as a better

future; networked discovery of Awareness, Motiva-

tion, and Pathways for transformation; and a green

ethic of care to guide transformation. We use an

imaginary of a river to learn from a confluence of

these ideas. They involve nodes of local governance

organized by front-line workers who restoried inter-

twined problems with an ethic of care. The challenge

uncovered is that restorative microstrategies proved

promising when steering powerless actors, but frayed

when faced with factory owners. More aggressive

strategies of nodal governance may bring forth more

responsive escalation in order to confront privilege.

Yet such strategies might be more creatively escalated

as nodes of conversational regulation that reconfigure

Shearing’s five insights to transform landscapes of

power. A coherence discovered inductively across

these insights revolves around restorative nodal con-

testation of hegemony. Even lives as infused with

domination as those found along the Kashaf River in

Iran, where our case study is set, can be restored in

counterhegemonic ways.

DOI: 10.1111/lapo.12173

©2021 University of Denver and Wiley Periodicals LLC.

Law & Policy. 2021;43:205–228. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/lapo 205

1|INTRODUCTION

Desertification, climate change, and water pollution drive environmental collapse along Iran’s

once mighty Kashaf River. The river’s boundaries contain a concentrated nest of intertwined

crises, including urban squatting, drug abuse, crime, poor public health, marginalization, and

ecological destruction. Coupled with constraints on state and urban planning and underfunded

public health, these crises present growing threats to the legitimacy and survival of the state

itself. We examine how this seemingly unpromising context offers insights into a better future,

and how it achieves this by uncovering the restorative potential of restorying old ways of fram-

ing both problems and solutions.

This article is not a study of the global south as “primarily a place of parochial wisdom, of anti-

quarian traditions, of exotic ways and means”(Comaroff & Comaroff, 2016, p. 14). Instead, we

argue that the more extreme environmental and geopolitical pressures from markets that Iran faces

can help the West comprehend the nested crises of the Anthropocene. The Anthropocene is the era

of human domination/destruction of Earth systems. Nested ecological and economic threats to the

legitimacy and survival of the state could provide insight, transposing the Comaroffs, on “How

Euro-America is Evolving Toward Iran.”It remains to be seen how either Iran or Euro-America will

evolve as threats shuttle between the everyday and the epic in future crisis management.

We bring together diverse strands of decades of scholarship by the South African criminologist

and regulatory scholar Clifford Shearing. Some of Shearing’s influence on our article flows not

directly from his academic pieces but from his character as a conversational colleague who seeds

ideas into the work of others by posing both micro questions, such as on mediation of conflict, and

macro questions, such as on species extinction in the Anthropocene. This article instantiates that

influence. We show how in the confluence of his different streams of ideas, there lies a holistic vision

of ways to understand and address complex problems. This new conceptualization of nodal envi-

ronmental restoration arose through our case study of a polycentric restorative response to crisis in

Mashad, a major city situated in North/Central Iran and through which the Kashaf River flows.

The case study reveals how the sheer scale and scope of the crisis has meant that the usual

regulatory failures of risk-shifting, heavy-handed targeting of crisis victims, corruption, capture,

regulatory ritualism, and legitimation crises did not signal an unsatisfying end to the story.

Rather, what emerged was a restorative response, mobilized largely through one of Mashad’s

prosecutor’s offices, that gradually expanded the variety and agency of those involved in their

roles as victims, offenders, and regulators. We articulate the ways in which this restorative

response is best understood through drawing upon five streams of Shearing’s scholarship,

cohering the ongoing challenges of reconfiguring landscapes of inequality. These five streams

are: nodal governance; regulatory culture as a storybook (rather than a rulebook); justice as a

better future; networked discovery of Awareness, Motivation, and Pathways (AMP) for trans-

formation; and a green ethic of care to guide transformation.

Critically, we show how addressing macroscale problems such as climate change and large-

scale corporate pollution can be productively entangled with the restoried restorative approach

used at a micro level to steer powerless actors away from harmful conduct. This potential points

to an ecological restorative approach to environmental harm. This approach is able to illumi-

nate the interconnections between justice at many scales and to evoke new imaginaries out of

interconnected crises.

We offer the entire Kashaf River narrative as one that “walks”with non-Western scholars

and thinkers (and practitioners and activists) from whom we can learn and “co-produce new

responses to the Anthropocene challenge”(Harrington & Shearing, 2017, p. 138). The Kashaf

River prosecutors set aside prosecutors’usual construction of reality, namely that their job

responds to illegality with proportionality of force under the rule of law. They restoried this

script to instead display an ethic of care toward marginalized people trapped in an ecological

vortex by aiming for “justice as a better future”(Froestad & Shearing, 2012).

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