Spatial development strategy: stage of radical renewal

The article says that the adoption in 2019 of the Spatial Development Strategy of the Russian Federation for the period until 2025 (Spatial Development Strategy 2019) became one of the first systemic strategic planning documents in the country, developed and approved after the adoption of Federal Law No. 172 “On strategic planning in the Russian Federation” (hereinafter referred to as Federal Law No. 172). In recent years, both the Spatial Development Strategy 2019 and the plan of its practical implementation have been the subject of a significant number of severe critical assessments. Even doubts appeared that further work with this document generally is not worth continuing (although it is formally mentioned in Federal Law No. 172 among the mandatory federal strategic planning documents, developed within the framework of goal setting based on a sector and territorial basis). The coming update of Spatial Development Strategy 2019 sets a number of tasks for the scientific and expert community that have theoretical, methodological, and purely practical significance. First of all, it is necessary to support the opinion that the practice of spatial strategizing undoubtedly needs to be continued, since it is an important component of an integral system of strategic management at all levels of public authority. It is necessary to develop a methodological basis for a development strategy in the absence of a “basic” strategy for the socio-economic development of the Russian Federation, although formally, this variant of action contradicts the entire logic of strategic planning. It is important to determine how the practice of spatial strategizing fits into the vertical of strategic planning. It is very important to construct a program-design “deployment” of Development Strategy 2019 and, on this basis, determine its economic basis, as well as clearly identify all the target parameters of this strategic planning document. The article makes an attempt to outline the ways to solve these important problems.