Amendments in spatial development strategy: are there any significant advances?

Taking into the account the opinions, expressed at the 20th Anniversary Strategic Planning Forum in St. Petersburg in October - November 2022, the article analyzes amendments and additions introduced in 2022 to Spatial development strategy of the Russian Federation until 2025. The significance of these adjustments is determined by the fact that spatial development strategy remains the key regulator of one of the most significant directions of social and economic strategizing in the country. The task of this strategy updating was greatly facilitated by the significant set of analytical materials and recommendations concerning the key conceptual blocks of this strategy. In particular, these are the recommendations, which have been expressed year after year at the Strategic planning forum. However, the article expresses the idea that this informative material was not sufficiently used in the development of the amendments and additions to the strategy. The authors specify that these amendments and additions have a targeted character and generally do not help to overcome numerous negative aspects of this strategy, which were shown almost immediately after the official adoption of this document. The social and economic instability of recent years, which has negatively impacted the entire practice of strategic planning, has fully affected the spatial direction of this planning. In this regard, the authors insist a spatial development strategy that meets all the requirements of long-term public management is hardly possible in the absence of a “basic” strategy for socio-economic development of the Russian Federation, and without a number of systematic legislative acts, like the law on the basis of state policy for regional development, the law on agglomerations and a fully updated version of the law on local self-governance.