Identifying and Analysing the Drivers Shaping the Future of Urban Parks in Mazandaran Province from a Green Management Perspective

Introduction:
Rapid urbanization and spatial expansion exacerbate pressures on urban ecosystems, causing resource depletion, biodiversity loss, and microclimatic degradation. In modern urban planning, urban parks serve as essential green infrastructure, providing critical ecosystem services, promoting public health, mitigating urban heat islands, and attenuating stormwater runoff. These functions are particularly crucial in ecologically vulnerable regions such as Mazandaran Province in northern Iran, which faces high tourist influx, shifting coastal-mountain microclimates, land-use conversion, water scarcity, and rising energy demands.
However, merely expanding physical green space does not ensure operational sustainability. The long-term resilience of urban parks depends on how they are designed, maintained, and governed. In response, the “green management” approach provides an integrated framework that optimizes resource consumption, adopts smart technological innovations, and systematically minimizes environmental impact through climate-resilient landscaping, smart water recycling, decentralized renewable energy, and regulatory compliance.
Despite expanding literature on urban green infrastructure, existing studies remain fragmented, primarily examining isolated operational metrics rather than conducting holistic analyses. A significant research gap persists regarding systemic structural foresight that evaluates the overarching Political, Economic, Social, Technological, Environmental, and Legal (PESTEL) forces shaping urban park development. Without an integrative structural methodology, urban planners risk misallocating finite municipal resources to superficial symptoms rather than addressing critical leverage points that drive sustainable systemic transformation.
The Purpose of the Research:
This study aimed to identify, validate, and structurally analyze the critical drivers shaping the future sustainable development of urban parks in Mazandaran Province from a green management perspective. The primary research question directing this investigation was: Which drivers, and through what systemic patterns of mutual influence and dependence, govern the future sustainable development and green management of urban parks in Mazandaran Province? To address this question comprehensively, the research sought to achieve four interconnected operational objectives: first, to extract an exhaustive catalog of potential drivers from the intersection of sustainable urban green infrastructure and green management literature; second, to contextualize, refine, and validate these drivers specifically for the socio-ecological landscape of Mazandaran Province through rigorous expert consensus; third, to map the intricate structural web of interrelations, direct and indirect impacts, and systemic feedback loops among the verified drivers using structural cross-impact analysis; and fourth, to determine the structural role of each driver—differentiating input/determinant forces and critical linkage variables from secondary dependent outcomes and autonomous factors. By achieving these objectives, the study moves beyond traditional, reductionist, one-dimensional evaluations to deliver a systemic roadmap that equips urban municipal authorities, environmental planners, and park administrators with evidence-based leverage points for long-term strategic spatial planning.
Methodology:
This study employed a structural foresight approach based on a pragmatic paradigm, conducted in four main stages. First, an extensive review of the literature on urban green spaces, green management, climate resilience, and smart resource systems was carried out to extract preliminary drivers, which were then categorized under the six PESTEL dimensions. Second, the content validity, clarity, and regional relevance of the drivers were refined through consultation with a panel of 16 purposefully selected experts in urban planning, environmental science, and municipal management. Third, a three-round Delphi technique was utilized to screen and validate the drivers based on expert agreement; ultimately, 18 strategic drivers achieved high consensus and were retained for structural modeling. Fourth, the interactions among these 18 drivers were analyzed using a cross-impact matrix in MICMAC software. Expert assessments were aggregated to construct the direct influence matrix, and both direct and indirect relationships were computed. Finally, the drivers were mapped onto Cartesian coordinate planes and classified into four strategic groups: input/determinant, linkage/relay, output/dependent, and autonomous variables.
Findings and Discussion:
The structural analysis revealed that the 18 identified drivers play distinct roles in the green management system of Mazandaran’s urban parks. Legal and policy-oriented factors emerged as the primary “engines” of the system (input/determinant quadrant), exerting significant influence while remaining structurally independent. These serve as the essential starting point for any systemic transformation.
Technological and environmental factors function as critical “linkage” variables, acting as conduits that translate these high-level policies into operational reality. Conversely, financial and economic factors were classified as dependent variables; rather than acting as initial drivers, they are secondary results that materialize only after robust regulatory and technological frameworks are successfully established. Finally, several socio-cultural and operational factors were found to be largely autonomous, demonstrating weaker direct links to the system’s core. These findings align with international literature, reinforcing that sustainable urban development requires prioritizing legislative mandates and technological infrastructure over immediate financial incentives. This confirms that financial sustainability is a downstream benefit of sound green management policy, rather than its initial precursor.
Conclusion:
The strategic foresight investigation concludes that the future sustainable development and green management of urban parks in Mazandaran Province operate as a hierarchically organized, highly interdependent structural system. The systemic architecture demonstrates that sustainable transformation is initiated by upstream legislative mandates and sustained policy incentives, propagated through intermediary linkage conduits of climate adaptation and smart water-energy technologies, and ultimately culminated in downstream operational cost-efficiencies and expanded ecological returns. Consequently, urban policymakers, municipal authorities, and green space planners must abandon fragmented, piecemeal interventions and instead sequence structural initiatives in strict alignment with the systemic hierarchies identified by the MICMAC model. Municipal authorities must establish the first strategic implementation phase around institutional and regulatory governance: formally embedding mandatory smart-technology prerequisites within park construction and renovation licensing codes (L1), codifying measurable zero-energy operational targets for municipal public assets (L2), and linking administrative and financial concessions directly to verified energy monitoring performance (P1, P2). Once an unyielding legal baseline is secured, capital investments in the second strategic phase must be directed toward the linkage core specifically deploying automated sensor-based irrigation networks (T1), closed-loop graywater recycling treatment plants (En2), and decentralized solar/biomass energy systems (T3) configured specifically to reinforce local microclimatic resilience (En1). Financial returns, measured through tangible reductions in municipal water and energy utility budgets (E2), must be utilized as systemic performance indicators and accountability benchmarks rather than upfront prerequisites.
While this study provides an empirically robust, structurally validated roadmap, its methodological boundaries present productive avenues for subsequent scientific inquiry. The empirical focus was restricted specifically to designated urban parks within Mazandaran Province and did not encompass suburban forest parks, protected riparian belts, or unmanaged urban green corridors. Additionally, the structural configuration reflects the collective expert consensus of the selected panel at a specific analytical junction. Future research should formulate dynamic, multi-directional future scenarios based on the four determinant drivers identified, conduct cross-regional structural comparisons across diverse biogeographical zones with differing institutional capabilities, and substantiate the predictive structural pathways through empirical, multi-year longitudinal assessments measuring actual kilowatt-hour energy savings, volumetric water recycling rates, and operational life-cycle cost reductions.