Regional Development in Russia: An Ecosystem Approach to Territorial Sustainability Assessment

The current crisis has indicated the need to review the policy of economic growth and globalization towards the search for new sustainable models of the internal territory development able to resist external shocks and threats. To achieve this goal, it is required both to implement sustainability strategies, and to assess the obtained results towards sustainable development. Despite an abundance of literature on sustainability assessment, there is a lack of understanding of the application of sustainability assessment in regional/local contexts. The purpose of the article is to improve theoretical and methodological aspects of the formation of territorial (regional) ecosystems by developing a new approach to assessing its sustainability. We believe that territorial ecosystem sustainability assessment is possible through the entropy of a complex system composed of the entropies of its constituent ecosystems or the entropies of different types of territorial capital (human, production, natural). An application of the entropy approach allows to understand specific features of a particular ecosystem characteristics. We demonstrate our methodology with two empirical case studies of territorial ecosystems of Penza and Vladimir regions. As a result of the analysis, it was found that ecosystem’s sustainability is achieved, primarily, due to the natural capital of the territory. The methodology proposed in our study aims at ensuring comprehensiveness and robustness of the evaluation supporting the decision-making process.