The world is confronted with two important approaches - planning and environment - in pursuit of sustainable development, resulting in the emergence of a new term called environmental law, of which program laws are a part.Designing and implementing development programs without systematic attention to environmental considerations poses serious challenges to the path to achieving sustainable development. Therefore, assessing the level of attention to the environment in past development documents can provide a basis for reviewing future policies. The present study, using a text-based and category-based content analysis method relying on the Environmental Performance Index (EPI), analyzes the course of attention to the environment in five development programs before the revolution and six development programs after the Islamic Revolution. The findings show that although in the early stages, the concept of environment did not exist in the text of the programs and only some related categories (such as natural resources) were referred to in the agricultural section, later, with the approval of the Fifth Development Plan, the environment entered the planning structure as an independent section. After the revolution, the status of the environment gradually improved, but in recent years, despite legal emphasis, a 22-point decline in Iran's EPI performance index has been observed, indicating a gap between the approved content of programs, laws, and their effective implementation.
