Municipal strategies in Russia: new conditions and new challenges

The article aims to summarize new conditions and new challenges, which currently determine the possibility and even the need for substantial revitalization of the strategic management of the social and economic development of Russian municipalities. Five years of practice of implementing the provisions of the Federal Law no. 172 on strategic planning in the Russian Federation revealed a sufficiently large number of gaps in this legislative act, which currently need to be filled. However, the complexity of the situation cannot be reduced only to the initial mistakes made during the development and adoption of this legislative act. Much of the issues which need to be amended or supplemented in the law on strategic planning today is connected with new conditions and priorities of the social and economic development of the country, its regions and municipal territories. The mentioned above fully concerns the issue of the logical (in the legal and economic sense) completion of the “hierarchical relationship” of strategic planning through a more complete and clear legal regulation of the main forms and key functions of strategic planning at the municipal level of management. The solution of this problem is not limited only by the elimination of the dualism or uncertainty that is necessary for positioning municipal strategizing in the current version of the Federal Law no. 172. The point is that legal regulation should cover a lot of new phenomena of territorial organization of production, settlements (for example, megacities, agglomerations); identify the features of municipal management and strategizing in such specific “points” as towns and mono industry cities, particularly depressed settlements, intercity municipalities, etc. However, the necessity to achieve the coordination of positions on this wide range of issues between the legislation on strategic planning and the legislation on the general principles of the organization of local self-government in the Russian Federation is shown.