Methods of Effective Governance of Territorial Transformations in Russian Federation

Considerable territorial differentiation existing in Russia today contributes to both federal and regional economic slowdown. Alongside with that, gaining control over the process of territorial differentiation at the micro-level in order to reduce disparity among rural municipalities and to ensure their sustainable development, is considerably hindered, taking into account the gap between the tasks local self-governing bodies have to accomplish and the financial resources at their disposal. Territorial transformation of municipal entities (regional rural settlements) may become one of the possible solutions to the problem. That would make it possible to optimize local administrative machineries, to reduce imbalance and disparity in economic development of rural municipalities and to channel the funds released towards the vital problems of local significance. However, the problem of preliminary comparison of socio-economic development rates of municipal entities within a region, which is required for further successful implementation of strategies of rural territorial transformations, still remains unsolved, since currently no generally acknowledged and scientifically based specific methods for that purpose are available. As the result of the theoretical and practical research work carried out by the author, the article presents the territorial transformation procedure algorithm and proposes the model to evaluate synergistic effect of the activities intended to foster optimization of territorial structure of rural areas.