Incentives for interregional cooperation in federal spatial policy: Challenges and opportunities

The approval by the Russian government of a new Spatial Development Strategy for Russia at the end of 2024, which, unlike a similar document in 2019, does not contain a thesis on the need to strengthen interregional cooperation in macro regions and the composition of such macro regions, raises questions about the current state of interregional cooperation as an object of federal spatial policy and the importance of macro regions for its strengthening. The paper shows that there are both prerequisites and limitations for its development, primarily in terms of financial and economic interaction based on the analysis of scientific literature, federal legislation, and accumulated experience in the field of interregional cooperation. We propose the following areas of improvement of federal policy in the field of interregional cooperation to mitigate the latter: clear articulation of issues of financial and economic interaction between regional authorities as the object of activity of departments responsible for spatial development of the Ministry of Economic Development of Russia, organization of work in the Ministry on generalization and dissemination of best practices of interregional cooperation, monitoring and coordination of activities of other federal ministries in this field; expanding the practice of federal participation in projects related to cooperation between regional authorities, developing additional financial support measures for such projects; working out the issue of distributing personal income tax between territorial budgets as a necessary condition for the development of interregional cooperation, especially in urban agglomerations. The article highlights the stages in the transformation of federal policy toward macro regions in their broad sense (as associations of subjects of the Federation, regardless of their names). The correctness of the decision to abandon the unified grid of macro-regions is recognized and a flexible approach is proposed to form associations of regions for cooperation between regional authorities – combining regions in different compositions that are optimal for solving specific tasks of interregional cooperation.