Meta-Synthesis of Weak Points and Facilitators of Iran's National Development Plans

A great volume of studies and researches are conducted for evaluating Iran's five-year development plans, with the main purpose of overcoming obstacles and realizing the goals of national strategic plans. Considering the large volume of studies on evaluation of development plans, on the one hand, and the inconsistencies and contradictions of the findings on the other hand, the method of meta-synthesis is adopted by the researcher as an efficient method for systematically summarizing and analyzing the wide range of results. For this purpose, published and unpublished qualitative literature in the context of development programs, dated between 1992 and 2015, were selected. Having reviewed the full-text of these articles, reports and texts, the ones which accurately examined the weaknesses as well as the facilitators of national development programs were chosen and compared with each other. The data were first analyzed via adopting thematic analysis approach and then were reanalyzed through encoding method. The results of the analysis of obstacles against development programs were extracted and interpreted within thirteen themes and five codes of facilitators, namely, convergence and integration of higher education with social system while linking knowledge and industry, promoting balanced development, limiting government in the development process, strengthening social system as the context of development and expansion of international interactions. The findings ultimately suggest the necessity of promoting development through a dynamic systemic approach.