Energy Governance Trap of Petrostates to Achieve Sustainable Energy Security: Evidence from Iran

For petrostates, achieving sustainable energy security presents a critical dimension for national security, where entrenched hydrocarbon dependence conflicts with long-term sustainability and resilience objectives. While technical pathways are often clear, the governance barriers to transition remain poorly theorized, particularly in petrostates. Therefore, this study examines how governance-related and structural factors within Iran’s energy system condition or constrain the achievement of sustainable energy security, using MICMAC structural analysis and Random Forest Regression. Moving beyond sectoral analyses, the study first uses MICMAC to identify the influence and dependence relationships among the key drivers of Iran’s energy-security system and to determine the position of governance-related factors within that system. Second, a Random Forest Regression is employed to assess the predictive importance of selected energy and economic factors and to provide an exploratory scenario-based projection of energy intensity toward 2030. The results show that energy policy, energy production and consumption, and climate change function as relay variables within Iran’s energy-security system, while economic growth and energy efficiency are identified as the influential variables. The Random Forest projection indicates that energy intensity is expected to reach 2.1791 MJ/$GDP by the end of 2030, with solar, wind, and hydro variables showing the highest predictive importance. Furthermore, the findings demonstrate that technical transition pathways alone are insufficient unless the structural and governance conditions shaping Iran’s energy system are addressed to support sustainable energy security.