Section 9 · 10

Limitations

Publishing limitations is not a weakness of this Knowledge Center; it is the strategy. Everything below is stated as plainly as we can state it.

We would rather tell you what we do not know than pretend to precision we do not have.

What this research cannot tell you

The weights we chose are a judgment, not a discovery. We publish them, along with an analysis of what changes if you weight them differently. Only the top and bottom of the ranking hold steady across different weightings; the middle genuinely moves.

Several Iranian data sources we wanted could not be reached, and we say which. The International Monetary Fund has not completed a full assessment of Iran's economy since March 2018. No formal international damage assessment for Iran exists. We would rather tell you that than pretend to precision we do not have.

All sub-scores were assigned by one analyst against stated criteria. They have not been validated by a panel. Two informed people would produce somewhat different numbers and a somewhat different order.

This will change. Conditions change, evidence improves, and technologies move. Every revision is dated and recorded. If you think something here is wrong, we would like to hear it.

What the platform must not claim

The evidence on diaspora professional networks is mixed. The World Bank's foundational study of them — still the standard reference twenty years on — found that the binding constraint is usually the home country's institutional capacity, not the willingness of people abroad to help. Networks built around a single champion have collapsed when that person left. No rigorous impact evaluation of a comparable programme exists in the public record.

So we are not going to tell you what Iran Builders will achieve. We will tell you what it is: a directory of people and what they can offer, and an evidence base about what Iran needs. Both are useful on their own terms, and both are checkable. What gets built on top of them is not something we can promise in advance.

Kuznetsov (ed.), World Bank Institute, 2006 — unsuperseded in twenty years · Agunias & Newland, IOM/MPI, 2012.

The four evidence gaps to close, in priority order

  1. 1The Iran Construction Engineering Organization membership figure.
  2. 2Post-2018 graduate counts by field.
  3. 3Sweden's Iranian-born-only figure.
  4. 4Canada's Iranian-born figure as a public table.