The article highlights the challenges facing the process of creation and development of the North Caucasian Federal District tourist cluster. It provides the results of an analytical research into the development of the tourist industry in the Russian Federation, identifies the constraints to tourist cluster development, the major problems and plausible solutions that may pave the way towards the targeted results. The authors lay out a scheme for tourist cluster creation and define priority directions of training personnel for the tourist and service sector.

The article discusses the problems of forming a system of relationships between regional universities, as subjects of scientific activity, central government bodies in science and regional power structures. Interest in this issue is due to the polymorphic structure of scientific management bodies, insufficiently effective interaction between regional authorities and universities as the main centres of science in the region, the need for institutional identification of the role and place of the university as a generator of scientific ideas in the region's space. Based on studying the problems of institutionalisation in the field of science, the authors introduced the basic concepts of the subject area of research into scientific circulation, performed a theoretical analysis of the influence of the institutional environment on the competitiveness of regional science, and proposed a conceptual and theoretical approach to the study of regional science. The scientific environment features as an object of institutionalisation are revealed, the study of which made it possible to lay the foundations of the author's system of criteria-based assessment of the level of competitiveness. Recommendations for the formation of tools for increasing the competitiveness of objects and subjects of scientific activity, developed by the authors, can be used to expand the framework of the theory of competitiveness and the theory of management of professional organisations; in the practice of organisational management to monitor the competitiveness of regional science.