Social justice constitutes a fundamental pillar of identity and political legitimacy in the Islamic Republic of Iran. However, the persistence of redistributive challenges, spatial disparities, and fluctuations in welfare indices necessitate a systemic examination of the decision-making ecosystem. This study aims to analyze the social justice policymaking system in post-revolutionary Iran through a comprehensive policy-cycle framework.

Employing the Policy-Cycle Model synthesized with Kingdon’s Multiple Streams Framework, this study deconstructs social justice policy into five sequential stages: problem structuring, agenda-setting, formulation and adoption, implementation, and evaluation/feedback. The methodology is qualitative, relying on documentary analysis of foundational statutes, five-year national development plans, budgetary laws, and institutional oversight reports.

an ontological and legitimacy-driven character, yet faces tensions between normative ideals and objective resource constraints; 2) In agenda-setting, institutional multiplicity opens diverse policy windows while complicating persistent strategic prioritization; 3) Policy formulation is marked by legal proliferation alongside recurring paradigm shifts across administrations; 4) The pivotal bottleneck emerges in policy implementation as an “Implementation Gap,” driven by institutional fragmentation, absent integrated welfare registries, and inflationary erosion of redistributive tools; 5) In evaluation, despite robust technical reporting, bureaucratic inertia and political-economic rigidities obstruct the “feedback loop,” constraining institutional learning.

Enhancing the effectiveness of social justice policies in Iran relies less on generating supplementary legislation and more on establishing centralized implementation governance, dynamic data-driven targeting, and institutionalizing binding mechanisms that convert evaluation findings into policy redesign.