The article substantiates the need to use new approaches in describing the regional economic security including the institutional theory. We argue the importance of economic security for overcoming governance imperfections. Moreover, it is significant to a new paradigm unifying various theories that differ from one another according to methodological features — substantive, functional and axiological ones. In the modern theory of socio-economic development, more attention has been paid to the regional economic security and its institutional explanation. The purpose of the article is to study the economic security of a region through the prism of institutional factors. These factors allow revealing internal features that determine the nature of regional economic security. However, studying these factors using traditional economic theory remains less accessible. The research hypothesis supposes that our method of studying the economic security increases the effectiveness of scientific analysis. Moreover, it allows to identify a region as a complex phenomenon where universal standards of market behaviour can be considered as the special cases of economy. In this regard, the research contributes to the concept of regional economic security. We consider a region using the French «theory of agreements». The application of the theory of conventions allows to re-formulate the concept of the interaction of regional government bodies with a multi-institutional object of regulation. This is a typical for addressing the issue of economic security of northern regions where the problem of market behaviour has more acute and painful form. The outcome of this work can be used as a guide for the modernization of regional governance.

The article considers the problems of improving the economic system and shaping the relevant rules and norms of economic activities in the context of the institutionalism’s growing importance. We analyse the possibility to use the «agreement theory» and «philosophy of co-operation» for explaining the essence of economic policy as a whole, regional policy of the state and economic policy of the regions (constituent entities of the Russian Federation). In the institutional approach, the key role belongs to the coordination of interests that is both an objective law of public development and the way to overcome critical situations. We characterise subsystems of the «agreement theory», including an exchange of commodities, production and technologies, traditional economic activities, ecology, civil society, public opinion, creative activities. The obtained «matrix of understanding» might be used as a «roadmap» of the economic policy at all levels (state, region, company) taking into account an obligatory adjustment for the specificity of the national economy and its spatial arrangement. We have underlined that the general theoretical concepts of economic policy can not be applied to the regional policy. The whole (national economy) cannot be reduced to the sum of the parts (regional economies), thus, many macroeconomic processes and events are not traced in its individual components. In the regional development, the institution of economic federalism plays the key role. We have defined the spheres of the regions’ economic activities, where regional efforts can lead to the positive result. Such spheres include property relations, rational nature management, price policy, fiscal and credit-and-monetary spheres, regulatory actions of the relations between the state and regional authorities, and interregional integration.