Despite more than seven decades of development planning in Iran, the country’s development outcomes-particularly in terms of sustainability, accumulation, and effectiveness-have remained significantly distant from stated objectives. Although the Iranian development literature, especially in recent decades, has extensively addressed the causes of this condition, it continues to suffer from analytical fragmentation and a lack of theoretical coherence. This study approaches the development problem not as an isolated case of policy or implementation failure, but rather at the level of the theoretical and meaning-based configurations through which development has been conceptualized in Iranian academic discourse. This study employs a comparative analysis and qualitative meta-analysis of 19 selected domestic studies on development and Iran’s five-year development plans. In the first stage, the studies were comparatively analyzed across three levels: conceptual, explanatory, and methodological. In the second stage, qualitative meta-analysis was conducted using open, axial, and selective coding to reconstruct the dominant explanatory logics within the Iranian development literature. The findings indicate that the Iranian development literature is organized around three dominant approaches: the instrumental/policy-oriented approach, the normative/ideological approach, and the analytical/discursive approach. While these approaches converge in recognizing the existence of a development crisis, they diverge significantly in explaining its origins. The qualitative meta-analysis reveals that the common denominator across these approaches is an inability to stabilize a coherent and hegemonic meaning of development, a condition conceptualized in this study as the “crisis of the hegemony of development discourse”. The study concludes that the chronic failure of development in Iran is less the result of instrumental weaknesses or value-based conflicts, and more deeply rooted in a crisis of meaning and the absence of discursive consensus. Accordingly, any sustainable policy reform requires a fundamental rethinking of the mechanisms through which meaning is produced and the hegemony of development discourse is constructed and stabilized.