Green Reconstruction, Policy Sequencing, and Sustainable Regional Competitiveness: A System Dynamics Analysis of Karabakh and Eastern Zangezur

Early-stage post-conflict regions must rebuild essential infrastructure while avoiding development pathways that create long-term environmental and institutional costs. This study examines how green reconstruction, policy sequencing, and sustainable regional competitiveness may co-evolve in Karabakh and Eastern Zangezur during 2025–2040. A scenario-based System Dynamics (SD) model developed in Vensim compares Baseline Reconstruction, Eco-Tourism Promotion, Green Investment, an Integrated Policy Mix, and Accelerated Reconstruction. The normalized simulations indicate that stand-alone interventions generate partial gains and trade-offs, whereas the full Integrated Policy Mix produces the most balanced outcome under its stated, more favourable policy settings. Eco-tourism promotion increases attractiveness and demand but may intensify carrying-capacity stress when services and environmental management lag; accelerated reconstruction can create institutional overload when implementation demands exceed absorptive capacity. A matched policy-intensity comparison does not show uniform mixed-package dominance over both stand-alone alternatives, so the full Integrated advantage cannot be interpreted as a pure coordination effect. An exploratory global uncertainty analysis preserves the original ranking under the specified perturbation design. The results are assumption-dependent policy experiments rather than empirically estimated forecasts and support conditional, phased, and capacity-sensitive reconstruction strategies.