Justice and Progress Fund; A step towards financing, decentralization and strengthening of local government

Purpose: The main purpose of this study is to identify the various aspects of the Justice and Progress Fund and delineate its directions in the future. In fact, the important goals of this study are to evaluate the strengths and criticisms of the Omid Entrepreneurship Fund, to identify ways getting out of the bottlenecks of the Omid Entrepreneurship Fund, to present competing alternatives to the Justice and Progress Fund, to present the advantages and bottlenecks and limitations of the Justice and Progress Fund, and to identify solutions for the implementation of the Justice and Progress Fund.
Methodology: The methods used in this research are descriptive, evaluation, content analysis and comparative studies. From the point of view of aim, the research is an applied and developmental type. The tools of this study were a researcher-made questionnaire, interviews and library and documentary studies. The data were collected as a library work by using the theses, scientific and research papers as well as conference articles on the sites of Magiran, academic jihad database and scientific and research magazines of the ministers. Latin references were also used for their scientific and research articles cited on the google scholar site. To collect the research data, after making the necessary arrangements with the managers, experts and elites in the field, the research questions were provided to them in the form of a questionnaire. In total, 55 experts were selected using the snowball sampling method.
Findings and discussion: The results of the investigations show that the low cost of creating the fund (the structure, facilities and hardware of the Omid Entrepreneurship Fund), the alignment and sometimes overlapping of the goals of the Justice and Progress Fund with the goals of the Omid Entrepreneurship Fund, the possibility of holding provincial officials accountable for the optimal and efficient use of resources allocated, and the possibility of proposing and applying new financing models and leveraging them have been the most important strengths and opportunities of the Justice and Progress Fund. On the other hand, the lack of transparency in grants in paragraph (a) of note (18) have caused weaknesses such as the application of taste, lack of giving and receiving reports, replacing relationships and connections instead of regulations, eliminating economic justification in activities, and creating rent and corruption in the country.
Conclusions and policy implications: One of the most important results of the current research was determining the tasks and clarifying the direction of the Justice and Progress Fund in the future. Therefore, in a process of identifying dualities of orientation, an attempt has been made to prepare the basis for developing a conceptual model to form the Justice and Progress Fund.
Based on the summation of the opinions of managers and elites in this field, the research groups of the Development and Foresight Research Center, the Management and Planning Organization of the provinces of the country, and the expert opinion of the researcher based on the different parts of the article, and the opinions of all the interviewed people, the two options of continuing the Omid Entrepreneurship Fund and creating the Iran Justice and Progress Fund were taken into consideration. Although the Justice and Progress Fund has been examined in detail as the main idea of this research and placed in the center of attention of the study, the continuation of the Omid Entrepreneurship Fund is proposed as another option based on the opinions of experts in this field. The disadvantages of the Omid Entrepreneurship Fund have been evaluated to be far more than its merits. In general, based on the evaluations of growth and development funds and the views and opinions of experts and managers, it is possible to realize the Justice and Progress Fund. The key orientations in the design of the Justice and Progress Fund include emphasis on providing financial resources for non-governmental and second-optimal projects with specific criteria and conditions, creating financial leverage to use private sector resources, supporting businesses with high added value, supporting bases of investment and provision of facilities, financing small and medium-sized projects, emphasis on the method of providing domestic financial resources, allocation of facilities to projects based on prioritizing economic growth (realization of 8 percent growth) based on the national spatial development document, focusing on limited and specific goals, decentralizing and increasing the authorities of the Provincial Planning and Development Council, strengthening the local government, and the management and planning of the organization as a custodian institution.
The coordinates of the Progress and Justice Fund are proposed in this section in the areas of activity limits, realization and monitoring, how to provide financial resources, how to allocate facilities to plans and projects and management structures (powers and infrastructure) among them some are mentioned:
Completing and developing the production infrastructure in the provinces, developing transparent and program-oriented mechanisms for the allocation of financial resources of the Fund, emphasizing the provision of financial resources for non-governmental and second-optimum projects with specific criteria and conditions (allocating a maximum of 10 percent of the Fund's resources to governmental projects with high physical progress), creating a separate account in the province to inform the governors of the amount of resources and expenses in the fund, decentralization and increasing the authorities of the Provincial Planning and Development Council (allocating the fund resources to the provinces), further opening the path to the formation of the local government and the proposed trustee body for the Justice and Progress Fund, planning and budget organization of the country and at the provincial level, and altering the management and planning organization of the provinces into a provincial planning and development council (because the chairmanship of the council is the governor’s task; while enjoying the cooperation and support of the governors, the development priorities of the province will also be taken into account).