Jerry Pournel and Larry Niven's Codominon stories (written in the 70s during the Cold War) were premised on the idea of internal security through stagnation. Both the Soviet Union and the US grew concerned that the proliferation of technology raised the real specter of some numb nut third world despot making a technological breakthrough and then blowing up the world.
They got to the point of interstellar travels so they had resources forever , nuclear energy and room to spread out. So they decided the best thing to do was to freeze scientific research and technology and get rid of troublemakers by shipping them off planet. They outlawed a lot of research but the main thing they did was contaminate records of previous research with bad data. What scientist remained wasted a lot of time conducting research and formulating hypothesis based on gibberish data. They kept technology largely static, about early 21st century for newly two centuries. Then the wells came off and earth went boom. But by then, humans had spread out to space.
There is historical precendee for frozen technology in the "Gun powder empires of the middle east, india and china. The ottomans being the most obvious answers. In gun powder empires only the state has fire arms especially cannon. The great expense of gunpowder and it's strict regulation make it hard for anyone else to fight the central government. These empires grow more and more inward looking and obsessed with stability at all cost. They shut down schools, churches trade routes, anything that might start trouble. New technology is banned almost reflexively. The Ottomans banned the printing press in 1616 and the Islamic world has never recovered.
A civilization that fears instability and change will fear technology. Seems were are heading that way ourselves with the Precautionary Principle and claims that we shouldn't use new technology until it is proven absolutely safe, something impossible to do. If people become convinced that change will kill them and that stasis is the only safe "sustainable" type of society, then that society will strangle technology at every stage.
An industrial version of a gun powder empire could be some form of corporativism like communism, that managed to control an entire planet or region of space such that it had no external competitors. All the big corporations/state-enterprise would be tightly interleaved with the government and protected from free-market forces which would be illegal. They would have no incentive to create new technologies that might put them out of business. Likewise, the political side would like everything stable and predictable. Since the political leaders are in charge and want to stay that way and the executives/red-managers are comfortable two and everyone else has guaranteed jobs and social services. No one has any incentive to rock the boat.
New scientific knowledge could cause all kinds of instability from questioning the ideological basis of the regime to creating new technologies that would disrupt the economy and social disorder.
The only hitch they would have is that no society can exist on the exact same resource base forever. Either you have to have new supplies resources you can create with your current technology or your have to create a new resource with a new technology. A technologically static industrial society would need heavy recycling and some functionally infinite supply of base materials.
The best infinite supply at an industrial level would be space. Asteroids and moons could be mined for an infinite supply at a fixed tech. So a corporativist state would have incentive for space faring as long as it didn't rock the boat to much. Space would also be a good place for Gulags.
The society might split in two: between those in space and those on the planet. Those in space would be either exiles or merit promoted specialist. Space would attract dynamic individuals who could think and operate on their own. Combined with dissidents, they would be a danger to the regime back home.
A low-tech society like those of Meso-America who used massive amounts of highly skilled labor instead of technology might conceivably spread far and wide without developing much science or technology, at least for a long time.
The Meso-Americans prefected what we might call a dynamic, information intensive technology. More software than hardware. If they spread out and took that dynamic with them, they would not seek new tools and the like but would use the same wood and stone tools combined with their social organization.
Likely, they have to be the only civilization and likely the only sentients. But they would need some exterior threat or challenge to keep them internally cohesive. There might a semi-sensient life form common that required serious organized effort to push back. That would keep people from just wandering off into the wilds on their own. The environment should provide a lot of materials like wood but little like metal or coal. The environment should be fairly uniform over vast regions.
Imagine if the giant monolithic biome of the Siberian forest were a giant tropical rain forest like meso-America. There are nothing but low old mountains, mere hills and they are uncommon. Stone is rare and metals more rare. Rivers empty into fresh lakes or peter out in marshes into a dead sea. No sea travel, little water travel.
The surrounds are filled with a dangerous species, something that acts coordinated manner. To expand, a entire colony has to detach, make a city and keep functioning. Everyone is a cog and any internal disorder is lethal. Once the society hit upon the right organization, they would just clone it repeatedly as it spread outward.
If the planet was old, mountains worn down, metals might be hard to find. Low mountains would create fewer difference in air flow and clime at the same latitude. If continents were grouped around the equators, the vast majority of the habitual land might have a very similar tropical biome such that the same techniques would work everywhere.
The external threat would have to constant and probably need to popup everywhere. That would keep the comfortable interior communities from starting to fight themselves and possibly creating an incentive for technology escalation.
