Issues of global and regional planning have been on the agenda for many years. The aim of this paper is to explore various approaches to regional development and analyse their relevance to reaching sustainability in the area. Despite the well-known idea of sustainability being dependent on the three pillars: economy, society, and environment, we notice that the social aspect, especially the involvement of the local community in the decision-making process of regional developing planning lacks enough attention. In this research, we emphasize the importance of the bottom-up approach of regional planning. We used bibliometric analysis for detecting the state of the art for regional development planning questions, then we examined the problem of forming a system for ensuring the sustainable development of the region and proposed a program-targeted approach to determine the integral indicators of such development. We also suggested stages of implementation of the strategic plan at the regional level. We concluded that it is important to create national development plans utilizing a regional approach, which involves local projects and programs, which benefit not just the economy and ecological state of the regions, but also the inhabitants of those regions.