The Pathological Analysis of Regional Balanced Development in National Development Plans

Even though the development planning in Iran has been applied since the 1940s, it has not still made much progress in terms of balanced development as well as the regional justice in development and a huge amount of human capital, financial and natural resources which are consumed, have obtained few achievements. Therefore, it seems necessary to examine and analyze critically the dominant approach in the country’s planning regime, focusing on the issue of balanced development, and identify the strengths, weaknesses and challenges of development plans. Although many studies have been done to undertake this issue, it is necessary to study a comprehensive pathology of challenges and weaknesses of development planning in terms of balanced and regional development. As the studies have been done so far, often have covered limited scope with little attention to all aspects of development planning, it is necessary to put them in an order. Therefore, in this paper, at first Iran development plans with respect to regional balanced development are reviewed for almost seven decades and after that, the strengths and weaknesses of development plans after the Islamic Revolution have been analyzed in terms of regional balanced development. This article then provides a comprehensive pathology for the challenges of regional balanced development based on its significance and impacts. As a result, this paper tries to explain the related challenges and help to resolve them through categorizing previous studies and organizing different aspects of the challenges and weaknesses at three levels of pre-planning, planning and post-planning. The categorization of challenges shows the most important weaknesses in the process of balanced development in Iran which included a conceptual challenge toward balanced development, the problem of defining the region, allocating the financial resources and centralised planning system.