The Legal Environment and Regional Activity

The specifics of the current socioeconomic situation and the state and prospects of development of Russian regions and municipalities are largely determined by the legal environment, which forms under the strongest influence of the “federal presence”—centralization of the federal government in a decentralized state. In fact, the legal field of Russian municipal activity is completely federal: the list of jurisdictions and powers is closed, the types of municipal formations are unified, and the organization of activities and resources for local self-government are established by federal laws. It has been suggested that the territorial fragmentation of the country’s unified legal space should be considered the most important characteristic of the sociopolitical and socioeconomic heterogeneity of the Russian space. The article critically assesses ideas about the possibility of solving the problems of Russia’s spatial development mainly by the formation of local points (zones) of growth. The concentration of features and problems of the functioning of regional and municipal systems under conditions of Russia’s specific legal field is characterized by Russia’s Arctic zone. In the context of their views on the territorial fragmentation of this field, the authors analyze software solutions for a new type of special legal regime, “development support zones” in Arctic territories.