Analysis of Development Plans from Communications Perspective

The movement towards the goals of "Vision plan 1404" needs the perception of the requirements to prepare plans for achieving the favorite objectives of development. With the advent of the information age, the rules of development policy-making strongly have changed in the world and also unique opportunities areprovided by variables of communications for countries that have been in early stages of development. Based on this, considering the communications in macro-level and in the political, social, economic and cultural development plans is important and necessary. This requires a review and pathology of previous plans and evaluation of their strengths and weaknesses for preparing of more comprehensive future plans. Themain question of this study is: what is the approach of development plans to communications section after Islamic revolution? Which aspects of communications are considered, and what aspects are ignored?
This study analyzes five development plans after the revolution, by using of qualitative content analysis. Results show that in all five-year plans the focus was on hardware and quantitative dimensions of communication development and media, but qualitative and content aspects, such as the right to universal access to information, freedom to obtain and disseminate information within the constitution, freedom of speech and press, a move towards the information society and knowledge-based, also other dimensions of communications such as human, traditional and social communication has been less considered. In the fourth development plan that is "knowledge" – centered, new fields of communications has been studied comprehensively in comparison to other plans. According to these approaches and new scientific and experimental perspectives, this paper suggests further engagement in communications necessity for development policy-making.