Different Territories, Different Solutions: How to Plan Development in New Regions

In practice, however, these processes are already running in parallel. At the same time, territories within a single region differ markedly in terms of infrastructure condition, site readiness, land and property relations, and the capacity to launch economic and investment projects.

Strategic planning must therefore recognize that the transition from recovery to development does not happen simultaneously across an entire region, but rather as individual territories and projects become ready. The object of planning should be not only the Russian federal subject as a whole, but also individual municipalities, agglomerations, industrial sites, transport hubs, and zones of prospective housing development.

One Strategy – Different Territories

Differences are evident not only among the four regions, but also between territories within each of them. According to the Ministry of Construction's report on SEZ operations as of December 31, 2024, the LPR had 108 zone participants, the DPR had 98, Zaporizhzhia Oblast had 40, and Kherson Oblast had 24. Under a unified legal regime, the gap between the LPR and Kherson Oblast was 4.5 times. In Zaporizhzhia Oblast, the number of participants grew from 9 in 2023 to 40 in 2024; in Kherson Oblast, from 1 to 24. The high growth rates here largely reflect a low starting base. This is not an assessment of regional investment readiness, but a clear indicator of varying intensity in the use of the same investment instrument. The number of participants is simultaneously influenced by the timing of the mechanism's launch, business composition, site availability, infrastructure condition, security, administrative project readiness, and demand for support measures. Overall, by the end of 2024, the SEZ registry contained 265 organizations; their declared investment volume was estimated at approximately 115 billion rubles, and the number of jobs in the projects exceeded 82,000. This confirms that the investment mechanism has already become part of development practice, though the intensity of its use varies by territory. Meanwhile, the recovery agenda remains substantial in scale. According to the Ministry of Construction, since 2022, specialists from the Unified Customer in Construction production and procurement company have restored more than 2,600 facilities in the new regions. This shows that infrastructure recovery and the launch of investment mechanisms are already proceeding in parallel.

To this end, it is advisable to distinguish three management regimes. Under the recovery concentration regime, priority goes to basic living conditions and critical infrastructure. The prospective inclusion regime involves engineering, land-property, legal, and project preparation of territory for further development. The stable implementation regime allows broader use of program, project, and investment instruments.

The basis for choosing a regime may include, in particular, the technical condition of utility networks and roads, availability of sites free from third-party rights, connection to engineering infrastructure, urban planning and land-property certainty, readiness of project documentation, and confirmed demand from investors or the population.

These regimes should not be understood as a single linear ladder for the entire region. They can operate simultaneously: one municipality is restoring utility infrastructure, another is preparing a site and documentation, a third is already implementing an investment project.

Readiness Matters More Than Timelines

The same logic applies to resource allocation. Recovery expenditures are necessary for life-support systems and removing critical infrastructure constraints. Investment and development expenditures are for launching new production facilities, infrastructure, and investment projects. But no rigid temporal boundary is required between them.

What matters is the condition of utility and transport infrastructure, site availability, certainty of land and real estate rights, availability of prepared projects, their economic parameters, and the possibility of attracting non-budget financing—bank, corporate, concessional, or through PPPs. It is precisely the combination of these conditions that determines how justified the transition to more complex investment development instruments is. For management purposes, such readiness can be assessed using five groups of criteria: security and accessibility of territory; operability of basic infrastructure; land-property certainty; project readiness; availability of a financing source and investor, or confirmed budget decision.

Land-property readiness is of particular importance. Uncertainty about the rights holder, incomplete registration of rights, or unresolved property delineation can directly limit the implementation of an investment project, even if its economic viability is obvious. This also has regulatory significance: in the SEZ mechanism, the absence of a land plot suitable for the project that is free from third-party rights, or the owner's consent to provide it, can directly become grounds for refusing to conclude a contract. For PPPs, concessions, and direct private investment, this is not a formality but one of the basic conditions for launching a project.

Strategy as a Complex Organized Mechanism

That's precisely why a regional strategy must provide for different combinations of instruments for different territories within a single constituent entity of the Russian Federation. In one case, the foundation of resource provision still consists of budget financing and recovery programs; in another, it's about preparing a project portfolio and removing infrastructure and property constraints; in a third, it involves preferential regimes, public-private partnerships, concessions, and development institution instruments. This changes not only the volume of financing but also its underlying logic: from eliminating critical constraints to preparing assets, then attracting private capital and scaling up projects.

In such a multi-tiered strategy, monitoring becomes a permanent feedback mechanism. It makes it possible to track not only project implementation but also changing conditions in the territory, enabling timely adjustments to the sequence of measures, resource allocation, and the management regime assigned to the territory. The practical outcome of such monitoring should be a regularly updated map of territorial and project readiness.

The main principle is simple: don't wait for recovery to be completed across the entire region, but systematically remove constraints and launch development wherever a specific territory or project is already ready for it.