“Giving special attention to the development of a particular region is a political choice, but if it’s decided to give such attention to a region, it shouldn’t remain without practical substance and illusory,” said Auditor General Janar Holm. “The same applies to regional development in general. Unfortunately, the pile of national strategy papers that have no impact and offer false hope is already rather high.”
The fact that South-East Estonia has fallen behind is evident in a number of statistical indicators used to monitor regional development. For example, in terms of healthy life years left, the three worst performing counties are all in South-East Estonia, while in terms of labour productivity, the three worst performers are two counties in South-East Estonia. Also, compared to the rest of Estonia, South-East Estonia has more power outages per 1,000 inhabitants, and more difficulties in making gravel roads dust-free and developing high-speed internet.
The South-East Estonia Action Plan should tackle all these problems but unfortunately this is not the case. The plan gives a good overview of these challenges but leaves them largely unaddressed by measures. The logic of the action plan is to try to link actions and measures already existing in one way or another in sectoral policies to the problems of South-East Estonia, instead of doing the opposite. i.e. to design a suitable measure based on the problem or to develop a completely new suitable measure to solve the problem. As it stands, the Action Plan gives the public the misleading impression that the problems are being addressed and that some indicators are even improving, when in fact there is no link between the problems, actions and monitoring indicators in the plan, the number of measures is small, and even their impact on the monitoring indicators has not been identified. The conclusion on the South-East Estonia Action Plan can in principle be extended to the Ida-Viru Action Plan and the General Regional Development Action Plan, as the operational logic of all these plans is similar. Already in 2015, the National Audit Office pointed out in its annual review to the Riigikogu that the added value of these plans is questionable.
Although the Ministry of Regional Affairs and Agriculture, which coordinates the preparation and implementation of these plans, is not satisfied with the low impact, it has not been able to bring the situation to the attention of the Government of the Republic. At the same time, under the leadership of the Ministry of Regional Affairs and Agriculture, options for new strategic management solutions for regional development (regional development agreements) have been sought, which tackle some of the same challenges. It is not clear what will become of the existing ones and there is a risk that the number of strategy papers without impact will continue to grow.
The National Audit Office recommended that the Minister of Regional Affairs and Agriculture submit a proposal to the agenda of the Cabinet meeting of the Government of the Republic in 2026 to formulate a position at the level of the Government of the Republic on whether and how to continue with the South-East Estonia Action Plan, the Ida-Viru County Action Plan and the Regional Development Action Plan in the future. There are two options on the broader scale. To make these plans actually work at the level of the Government of the Republic through binding agreements, so that problems are matched by measures, the impact of the measures can be monitored and, if necessary, the measures adjusted, or, if there is no willingness to take such a substantive approach, there is no point in offering the residents of the regions false hope, and it would be better not to prepare more plans that have no impact.
The Minister of Regional Affairs and Agriculture admitted in his reply that the South-East Estonia Action Plan, as a document that is not part of the national strategic planning framework and has been approved by directive of the Minister of Regional Affairs, is not sufficient for guiding regional development in the absence of agreements with the sectoral ministries for financing the necessary measures, and promised to submit a more detailed action plan and corresponding proposals for discussion in the Cabinet by November 2026.
Taustaks
The National Audit Office analysed how the decision of the Government of the Republic to pay special attention to the regional development of South-East Estonia has been implemented and to what extent the South-East Estonia Action Plan developed for this purpose contributes to this objective.
The development and implementation of regional policy is one of the main tasks of the Ministry of Regional Affairs and Agriculture. The aim is to monitor regional development across Estonia and intervene with measures that balance the development advantages of the regions and reduce development gaps.
Regional policy, or balanced development of the regions, has been a separate thematic block in almost all of the action programmes of the Government of the Republic over the past decade. The most frequently recurring challenges have been the development and survival of rural areas, the creation of regional jobs and promotion of entrepreneurship, the availability of public services and infrastructure across Estonia, the dispersion of public authorities and investments, and taking regional specificities into account in the implementation of EU subsidies.
In the period 2014–2020, the regional development strategy and its implementation plan were in force on the basis of an order of the Government of the Republic, which were equivalent to other sectoral development plans of the state. At the end of the regional development strategy for 2014–2020, it was agreed that the activities to coordinate regional development should be continued but in the form of an action plan. In 2022 the Government of the Republic set the Minister of Regional Affairs the task to establish the Regional Development Action Plan, as well as the updated Ida-Viru County Action Plan and South-East Estonia Action Plan, and their joint implementation plan. Sectoral ministries were assigned the obligation to take the implementation plan into account in the activities of their areas of government and to participate in monitoring the plans. The protocol decision of the Government of the Republic shows that regional development needs central coordination, and that the Ida-Viru and South-East Estonia regions need special attention in this.
