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We argue that leaders employ one of two strategies to govern subnational regions. These governance strategies, in turn, condition how leaders appoint and manage the regional executives to whom they delegate authority. In the co-optation strategy, leaders advance local welfare by appointing locally embedded regional executives, who are drawn from the local population and enjoy relatively long tenures. In the suppression strategy, leaders ensure that regional executives suppress local threats to the regime by minimizing local embeddedness, which entails appointing nonnative executives and shuffling them frequently. The regional governance strategy that a leader employs, we argue, depends on the region's ex ante level of regime support. We test the theory with original data from the Republic of Congo and Kenya, encompassing 250 regional executives across three presidents. Although incumbent governments in Congo and Kenya confront different local threats, our findings highlight how similarly they manage the trade-offs of local embeddedness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]