Proposing a Policy Evaluation Framework: Application in Analyzing Population Concentration Organizing Policy in Tehran

The request for systematic data on the performance of public and nonprofit programs continues to increase across the world. For meeting this demand, policy evaluation applies social sciences research methods, especially political sciences to find the impacts of policy interventions systematically in order to improve social welfare through policy adaptations. Program and policy evaluation is a valuable learning strategy for increasing knowledge about the basic logic of policies, and the policies activities under way as well as about the results of policies. It may include constant monitoring of a program as well as one-shot studies of policy processes or policy impacts. The used approaches are based on social science research methodologies and professional standards. In Tehran, the capital our country, some factors such as the concentration of decision-making and decision-taking activities, production and service activities, and also activities related to public welfare, and state-funded large-scale investments have led to the problems caused by these concentrations such as lack of urban services, different types of pollutions, social problems and the potential risks of natural disasters. In this situation, public policy- making mechanism from the 1960s has adopted the policy of organizing the concentration of population in Tehran and several decisions have been made in relation to this policy. The main question in this paper is how to propose a public policy evaluation framework and apply it to analyze the success and failure of the population concentration organizing policy in Tehran over a specific period of time. To answer the above questions, a three-stage process has been designed and applied; in the first stage, using the indexing method, which transforms the concept of policy evaluation into detectable elements, a policy evaluation framework/ design is proposed. An evaluation design identifies what questions will be answered by the evaluation, what data will be gathered, how the data will be analyzed to answer the questions, and how the subsequent information will be used. This paper is focusing on evaluating the conceptualization of the given policy. In the second stage, related decisions affecting the organization of concentration of population and activities in Tehran are reviewed by tracking the legal texts and planning documents, which indicates the elements of the policy of organizing the concentration of population in Tehran. These include both urban and regional planning and sectorial policies documents and texts. In the third stage these traced documents have been analyzed using the proposed policy evaluation framework and the results of the policy evaluation have been reported. The final result of this paper is that although the policy of organizing population and activities concentration in Tehran from 1960s until now has positive impacts in terms of its goals, it has some shortcomings in terms of its conceptualization including unintended side effects, taking unachievable goals, not being internally coherent and not being consistent with policies in other policy fields.