In Indonesia, creating growth centres, such as the Free Trade Zone (FTZ), is a strategy for regional development to stimulate economic expansion. The location of the FTZ of the Batam, Bintan, Karimun (BBK) area has been chosen strategically near Singapore and Malaysia. As a recognized national strategic area, the BBK area demonstrates substantial potential to augment the advancement of the national economy. This research employs the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) to examine programs to prioritize strategies for advancing regional development. AHP has been demonstrated to facilitate the structuring of problems, identifying common opinions among respondents, and formulating solutions. The findings indicate that land preparation and permits are priority initiatives (0.122), followed by institutional reinforcement (0,111) and simplified requirements (0,071). As an archipelago, the enhancement of basic Infrastructure is also essential (0.052), mainly to improve connectivity. The next priority should be to improve the quality of human resources (0,051), fostering a favourable environment for investment. The outcomes of this investigation are expected to enrich the corpus of regional studies literature and provide valuable insights in assessing the efficacy of FTZ policies.

This study aims to analyze the relationship between government digitalization and the enhancement of community participation in development in North Sumatra Province. Digitalization is understood as an effort to transform bureaucracy through information technology, manifested in official regional government websites such as sumutprov.go.id, which provide various public services online. However, the effectiveness of such digital platforms in encouraging active citizen participation has not been widely explored, particularly in non-metropolitan areas. This research employs a descriptive qualitative approach with data collection techniques including observation, documentation, and semi-structured interviews with ten informants from various regions in North Sumatra. Data were analyzed using the Miles, Huberman, and Saldana model, supported by NVivo 15 software for thematic coding and data visualization. The findings reveal that although the public has access to digital government services, the level of engagement remains low due to structural barriers (internet access and digital literacy), cultural factors (offline habits), and institutional constraints (limited bureaucratic responsiveness). Based on the Diffusion of Innovation theory, most of the population falls into the late majority and laggards’ categories, indicating that digital innovation adoption is not yet widespread. This study offers novelty by specifically mapping the forms of digital community participation based on direct experiences and identifying the dynamics of digital innovation adoption within the context of regional governance. These findings have significant implications for the development of a more adaptive, inclusive, and participation-oriented digital government strategy in regional development.

The present paper aims to analyze, model and optimize regional development of rural and urban areas of Sistan & Balochestan, separately. The relationship between employment changes and growth rate of economic sections has been modeled and numbers of jobs required for providing optimum growth rate have been obtained. This paper indicates that considering the average census of five decades (1956-2006) the situation of labor market and growth rate of economic sections in urban areas are bad and worse in rural areas so that there is need to increase employment considerably in order to achieve minimum economic growth rate ( 1% growth).