SmartDest

The Azores are an increasingly attractive tourist destination. The excellence of endogenous resources has allowed it to consolidate its position as nature and adventure destination. Consequently, the regional strategy seeks to base this sector's growth on the principles of sustainable development. The potential granted by the new technologies is combined in an excellent opportunity to pursue this objective and convert the Azores into a smart tourist destination. Thus, according to this vision, a conversion plan was elaborated that can guide the performance of the destination management bodies and other stakeholders. In methodological terms, different techniques were applied, including the identification of good local practices and case studies for benchmarking, a self-diagnosis, interviews with stakeholders, and a SWOT analysis. The plan was concluded with the definition of measures, actions, and pilot projects to be implemented in the region following a structure based on the smart destinations development axes proposed in 2015 by Segittur.

Interregional Competition for Strategic Economic Factors

The present research featured various ways to increase the investment attractiveness of regions, realize the potential of their development strategies, and assess the resource provision of their strategic priorities. The limited resources and ever-growing interregional competition mean that regions strive to increase their competitiveness and attract the missing resources. The paper introduces a new approach to the problem: the factors of economic development of regions should be divided into basic and mobile. These two groups are to be analyzed for the level of provision of the regional strategic development. Such approach can help local authorities to attract resources and implement the sustainability of the regional strategy, thus increasing the local strategic investment attractiveness and improving the quality of life in the region. Regional governments should select priorities that have a high potential for attracting mobile resources from other regions. The paper also contains an algorithm for analyzing the resource provision of strategic priorities.

Counter-insurgency governance in the Sahel

Since 2013, the multiplication of regional and international strategies and actions directed at stabilizing Mali and the Sahel, and at countering and preventing violent extremism, has not improved the situation there and, arguably, some of it has made it worse. This article analyses the type of political order and regional governance that has been and is being built after almost a decade of international interventions in the West African Sahel. It is an effort at theorizing and making sense of what is considered here to be a permanent state of intervention in the Sahel that has evolved into a form of counterinsurgency governance—a concept being proposed to point to the influence and the infusion of counterinsurgency principles into philosophies of governance. This article argues that counterinsurgency governance insists on a set of power relations and configurations that seeks to impose limits, parameters and boundaries to the purpose of and the form that Sahelian states, governments and governance ought to take. As such, counterinsurgency governance is simultaneously a mode of governance and a web of political practices and contestation whose mechanisms have failed at fully implementing its principles in the Sahel. Its fallback is the emergence of a regional strategy to manage and establish limits to Sahelian political possibilities.

FORMATION OF A REGIONAL DEVELOPMENT STRATEGY TAKING INTO ACCOUNT THE SPATIAL COMPONENT: ON THE EXAMPLE OF THE REPUBLIC OF BASHKORTOSTAN

The relevance of this study is determined by the need to improve the tools for developing strategies for the development of territorial socio-economic systems, taking into account the realities of the current stage of development. Among these realities are the formation of the economic space of the region and the limited resources for development, which determined the logic, goal and objectives of this study. The purpose of this study is to develop theoretical, methodological and practical recommendations for the formation of a regional development strategy taking into account the spatial component. To achieve this goal, the following tasks were formulated and solved: clarification of the essence and content of the category "economic space" as the basis for accounting for this category in strategic developments; identification of the features of regional development, taking into account the spatial component; development of principles and prerequisites for regional strategy taking into account the spatial component of development; formation of a scheme for accounting for the spatial component in the development of strategies for multi-level territorial entities; development and testing of a modified model of resource provision for territorial development strategies as an updated toolkit for regional strategy. The novelty of the results of this study lies in the development of theoretical, methodological and practical recommendations for using the spatial component in the formation of a regional development strategy, which, unlike existing developments, allow taking into account the properties and characteristics of economic space when developing a block for the distribution of territorial resources and thereby provide conditions for increasing the resulting parameters multilevel territorial entities and the region as a whole.

Implementing long-term care systems in the Americas: a regional strategy

The Region of the Americas is facing accelerated demographic and epidemiological changes. As these trends will continue in future years, long-term care needs are expected to rise. How can countries respond to these challenges? We propose that countries in the Region should invest in the implementation of long-term care systems. Considering the heterogeneity in the Region, we propose a strategy based on three components: (i) understanding the problem; (ii) thinking about solutions; and (iii) building support and consensus. Depending on each country’s needs and capacities, these three elements suggest short-term and long-term actions and goals, from generating better information on long-term care needs to the implementation of long-term care systems. Longterm care is a relevant issue for the Region today. The task is challenging, but countries need to embrace it and move forward before it is too late.