Policy Entrepreneurship and Innovation in Reforming Subsidies in Iran; Who Matches Which Streams with Each Other?

Several conceptual frameworks have been proposed to analyze policy issues. One of these frameworks is the framework of the six streams, which presents the streams of problem, politics, policy, process, program, and technology and tries to explain the role of entrepreneurs and actors related to each of the six streams. In order to better understand the functioning of this framework, the Subsidy-Reform law has been chosen, which, like many other pending policies in the country for about two decades, had turned the minds of the policy makers. To investigate this case, the study of documents, books, written interviews and speeches of officials in the time period of 1990-2010 were examined. The results of this research show the influence of influential entrepreneurs such as Habib Fatini, Jamshid Pejhoyan and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, as well as the reasons for not accompanying some streams to complete the unfinished parts of the Subsidies-Reform Law. This research show that the most time-consuming issue in the policy-making process was to bring the subsidies-reform in the agenda, which lasted for about 20 years and finally domestic policy entrepreneurs were not able to make decisions and the role of World Bank entrepreneurs was very prominent in connecting the stream of politics and policy. This means, contrary to the general perception that Iran suffers from the problem of operationalizing the policy; Iran has a more serious weakness in the entrepreneurship sector of the policy, and the policy community that is responsible for paving the way for policies is not well empowered. At least, if we don't want to generalize this issue to all policies, it is true in the subsidy-reform plan.