OICC Press International Journal of Political Science 2228-6217 15 2 2026 08 17 Pathology of Foreign Investment Attraction in Iran from 1978 to 2024 Based on a Process Model in Public Policymaking 1 8 10.57647/ EN Hossein Hasani PhD Student in Public Policy Alireza Golshani Saeed Mirtorabi Journal Article 2026 08 17 Attracting foreign investment as one of the key tools for economic development has always been of interest to policymakers. However, Iran has faced numerous challenges in this regard in the last four decades. Although researchers consider factors such as economic factors, sanctions, and political uncertainty, etc. in analyzing the challenges facing foreign investment in Iran, the present study, in the form of a process model, considers foreign investment attraction in Iran to have structural and executive obstacles at all stages of the public policy-making process. The question to ponder is why, despite the attention of the policy-making agencies to the importance and necessity of attracting foreign investment in the country, the performance in the period examined in this article has been very poor? As evidence of the claim, the highest figure for attracting foreign investment in Iran was in 2012, at $4.5 billion. After that, foreign capital attraction in the country began a downward trend and reached its lowest level in the past 20 years in 2015, at $945 million; Or following the signing of the JCPOA, the amount of foreign investment in Iran increased in 2016, until after the US completely withdrew from the JCPOA, the amount of foreign investment decreased sharply again in 2019 and reached about one billion dollars. The results of this study, which was extracted using a descriptive-analytical method and by examining data related to foreign investment in Iran, show that foreign investment attraction policy over the past four decades has been seriously ineffective due to state-oriented, politicized, and disregard for global procedures and the inefficiency of the bureaucracy, lack of coherence in tools and structures, lack of use of scientific, methodical, and logical data-based processes, and the use of an interactive model, and as a result, has not been very successful in achieving the desired goals.