خدایار مرتضوی اصل

In recent decades, the concept of sustainable regional development has become one of the funda-mental axes of policymaking at regional levels in the Islamic Republic of Iran. In this regard, with the design and implementation of five-year medium-term plans such as the Fourth Development Plan, greater coherence and alignment between policies and executive actions emerged, and the de-cision-making system became more systematic. This research, using library tools for data collection and descriptive-analytical methods and qualitative content analysis, as well as utilizing the theory of social and spatial justice, sought to answer the question: What position has sustainable regional development policymaking had in the Fourth Economic, Social and Cultural Development Plan of the Islamic Republic of Iran? The results indicate that although the Fourth Development Plan, in terms of formulating laws and designing policies, has a progressive, comprehensive, and innovative approach and has attempted to integrate various dimensions of regional development indicators into a coherent and justice-oriented framework with a holistic and integrated view, it has encountered a serious gap between goals and field realities in the implementation and practice stage. Weak institu-tional coordination, lack of executive guarantees, and the dominance of political views over plan-ning logic have led to the achievement of goals being pursued in an unstable and unbalanced man-ner. Excessive reliance on unstable financial resources and inability to build effective institutions have hindered the operationalization of key concepts such as land planning and spatial justice. As a result, instead of realizing an integrated development model, this plan has become a manifestation of the disconnect between ideal planning and inefficient implementation.