Time and Public Policy in Iran: Explaining the Failure of the Sixth Development Plan

Abstract

Iran has more than seven decades of experience in national development planning, yet successive development plans have repeatedly failed to achieve many of their principal economic, social, administrative, and institutional objectives. This study examines the failure of the Sixth Development Plan through the analytical lens of time and temporality in public policy. Rather than treating time merely as the formal duration of a five-year plan, the study conceptualizes it as a structural dimension connecting political mandates, legislative procedures, fiscal cycles, administrative processes, and long-term developmental objectives. The research adopted a qualitative case-study design based on documentary analysis and semi-structured interviews with 18 government managers, policy practitioners, economic actors, and academic experts. The interview data were analyzed through thematic analysis, resulting in 49 subthemes organized under six principal themes. The findings indicate that the Plan’s failure resulted from the interaction of policy short-termism, institutional and electoral asynchrony, prolonged and contested formulation, comprehensive and excessive objectives, unstable financing, fragmented implementation responsibility, and weak long-term policy commitment. The misalignment between presidential and parliamentary cycles delayed approval and weakened shared ownership of the Plan, while dependence on annual budgets and volatile revenues undermined its multi-year financial assumptions. The Plan’s comprehensive orientation further increased coordination costs, dispersed administrative attention, and reduced the possibility of prioritizing limited national problems. Fragmented authority also enabled responsibility for nonimplementation to be transferred among the executive, legislature, budgetary institutions, and implementing agencies. The study concludes that the Sixth Development Plan failed because its medium-term developmental ambitions were embedded in a policymaking system governed by short political horizons, incompatible institutional calendars, uncertain resources, and discontinuous administrative commitment. Future development planning in Iran should therefore become more selective, problem-oriented, measurable, financially credible, adaptive, and institutionally coordinated across successive political periods.