An Investigation of the Rural Development Policies of Sixth Five-Year Social, Cultural and Economic Development Plan in Iran

In recent decades, planning system has faced a change in the concept of development because of the intrinsic dynamics of human societies and the ineffectiveness of theories in solving problems. The Intellectual concept development has required assessment of the conceptual framework of planning theories in the rural development. Therefore, the purpose of the present study is to investigate rural development policies of the Sixth Five-Year Development Plan of Iran based on postmodernism theory. The research methodology is qualitative based on Meta-synthesis and content analysis.  The method of collecting data is library-based and logical reasoning was used to understand the categories. The results showed that key principles of postmodernism theory are non-rationality. Evaluation of rural development policies revealed that these policies are relatively compliant with principles of postmodernism planning. In other words, programs derived from modernism are observed along with postmodernism planning policies that implies to eclecticism thoughts in provision of rural development policies of the Sixth Five-Year Development Plan.