Identifying and ranking the challenges of evaluating development policies in Iran (five-year development plans)

The aim of the research is to identify and rank the challenges of evaluating development policies in Iran. To achieve this goal, qualitative and quantitative methods have been applied in two stages. In the first stage, evaluation challenges were identified based on the qualitative coding method and existing research and reports, and in the second stage, they were ranked quantitatively by the hierarchical analysis method. At this stage, the data collection tool was a paired comparison questionnaire containing eighteen challenges, which was given to executive and academic experts in this field for ranking. A total of 34 questionnaires were analyzed. The research findings demonstrated "lack of will required to apply the evaluation findings" with a weight of 0.11641, "spirit of non-responsibility and irresponsibility" with a weight of 0.1064, and "negative perception of evaluation and resistance to it" with a weight of 0.0942, which are related to the culture of evaluating development policies, are more vital than the challenges related to technical and informational issues.