The definition of the relationship between “culture” and “development” in policy documents represents a “discursive battlefield.” This research aims to critically dissect this conflict within Iran’s “7th Five-Year National Development Plan,” the nation’s highest-level medium-term policy document, by employing a coherent, two-tiered analytical framework. The first tier (analytical-operational) utilizes a “directed qualitative content analysis” method to code the law’s text based on a five-fold conceptual framework (P1 to P5). These approaches include: 1) culture as an enabler/obstacle to development (functional), 2) culture for development (economic), 3) culture as a dimension of development (sustainability), 4) culture as development itself (humanistic/transcendent), and 5) culture as an arena of resistance and sovereign identity (governmental/security). In the second tier (normative-critical), the extracted discursive pattern is critically evaluated against the benchmark of the “Islamic-Iranian Paradigm of Progress” as the transcendent goal and normative standard of the research. Accordingly, the central research question is: What is the discursive architecture of the 7th Development Plan, and what structural and cultural gap does this architecture exhibit in relation to the ideal of the “transcendent human” envisioned in the indigenous paradigm of progress? Findings reveal a “hegemonic coalition” between the economic (P2) and functional (P1) discourses, rooted in the law’s literature of “economic growth” and “resolving imbalances.” This coalition is challenged by scattered “islands” of humanistic (P4) and sustainability-oriented (P3) approaches, while the entire conflict is oriented and constrained by an overarching governmental framework (P5). By explaining the dominance of “developmentalism” (tose’e-zadegi) in practical policymaking, this analysis offers specific strategic implications for bridging the gap between the “declared ideal” and the “operative approach” and moving toward a culture-based model of progress.