Barriers to the Implementation of E-Governance in the Iranian Legal System
Keywords:
E-governance, digital governance, public law, legal barriers, administrative law, IranAbstract
Despite sustained policy attention and repeated legal references, e-governance in Iran has not achieved effective, coherent, or transformative implementation. This article examines the causes of this failure by shifting the analytical focus from prerequisites and ideal conditions to the structural barriers that actively obstruct digital governance in practice. Adopting a doctrinal legal analysis combined with institutional critique, the study conceptualizes e-governance as a legal–institutional mode of exercising public authority rather than a purely technological innovation. The analysis demonstrates that the absence of a comprehensive e-governance law has produced a fragmented normative framework characterized by legal dispersion, regulatory ambiguity, and weak enforceability. These legislative deficiencies are reinforced by institutional barriers, including the lack of a central coordinating authority, bureaucratic resistance, and regulatory overload at the executive level, all of which contribute to policy incoherence and implementation paralysis. Judicial barriers further undermine e-governance through the absence of a developed doctrine of digital evidence, formalistic interpretation of digital rights, limited judicial specialization, and weak oversight of state-operated digital platforms. In parallel, participatory and societal barriers—such as state-centric digital design, digital inequality, and pervasive trust and privacy concerns—restrict meaningful citizen engagement and exacerbate legitimacy deficits. Taken together, these barriers reveal that e-governance in Iran has been approached primarily as a technical and managerial project, while its legal, institutional, and judicial foundations remain underdeveloped. The article concludes that without removing these structural barriers, digital initiatives will continue to function symbolically rather than substantively, perpetuating the gap between legal recognition and effective governance.
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Copyright (c) 2025 Mohammad Hasan Samizadeh (Author); Mohammad Taghi Dashti; Hojjatollah Ebrahimian (Author)
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