The current situation in realms of economy, society, culture or in the area of assessing social influences may be considered inappropriate and thus different actions have been performed to improve the situation. Accordingly, different forms of development, like economic development, social development and/or political development occur. 
But, people generally only recognize economic development. Societies take 3 types of actions to reach economic development:
Policy making, designing plans and implementing projects
Policies have a general and software-like nature. They are usually holistic. All developmental policies, plans and projects are generally called developmental action.
Annually, multiple policies, tens and hundreds of plans and thousands of projects are designed and implemented with the aim of realizing development-i.e. improving the current situations which are considered inappropriate. Developmental actions seem to have a technological nature and up to 3 decades ago experts ignored the social nature of development and its diverse influences on people’s life.
It has been proven for about 3 decades that developmental actions do not simply have technical dimensions and apart from the negative influences they have on people’s lives, their success in reaching their goals depends on some social variables. Nowadays, we know that the success of developmental actions usually requires considering social preconditions.
Every year, many dames are constructed and people living in the dam reservoir area will be forced to leave the area. Many irrigation channels are built and their rural applicant complain about construction charges and the fact that they cannot efficiently use them. Governments plan and implement diverse policies to appropriately control fuel consumption, targeting subsidies, giving financial and credit facilities, transferring natural resources, building refineries and oil/gas facilities, developing tourism, constructing roads and performing projects like railroad, pipe lines and many other actions which all affect people’s lives.