The concept of sustainable regional development (SRD) refers to the integration of sustainable development principles into regional development practice. Accordingly, SRD encompasses all activities and instruments that promote sustainable development within regional economic initiatives. This focus is justified firstly by the important role of regions as intermediaries between national and local levels, and secondly by the growing consensus that sustainability is an essential criterion within future regional development.

Regional planning entails formulating and enforcing strategies for a region’s economic and social growth; it is typically a subset of a larger national plan. As a type of official engagement in the economy, regional planning aims to reduce glaring inequalities and social tensions in certain areas (depression, stagnation of certain regions, excessive concentration of production and population in other areas, regional unemployment, etc.). In most parts of the world, strategic regional planning is seen as a novel approach to enhance the effectiveness of public administration of regional development. Within these shifts, strategic planning became increasingly important, primarily due to the expansion of the environmental complex and the planning for sustainable growth, but also because of the requirement for increased safety in both markets and states. The exhaustion of the previous state policy of regional development of the country, which was based on the ideas of reducing differences and equalizing the levels of social and economic development of the regions, is the critical factor that determines the need to improve and increase the efficiency of public administration in this area. This factor enhances and increases public administration’s efficiency in this area. The notions of sustainable development and regional planning are relatively recent, having emerged in the latter decades of the second millennium. There is consensus that a holistic and integrated approach to economic, social, and environmental processes is necessary for sustainable development, which is why the World Commission on Environment and Development established the idea. Sustainable development emerged from the United Nations Organization on the Human Environment’s 1972 Stockholm Conference. Through science diplomacy, this endeavor examines Sweden’s participation in the UN in 1967 and 1968, culminating in the landmark UN Conference on the Human Environment in 1972. In the 60s of the previous centuries, certain industrialized nations of the EU, the USA, Canada, Japan, and other countries began successfully implementing a technique known as regional development. This policy came into existence not because of the imposition of funds, as is currently the case in the case of EU candidate states, but rather because, throughout history, the regions have evolved and developed in different ways and at different rates; this is why we are currently witnessing a very heterogeneous landscape in terms of their respective levels of development.