Two sides of the same coin: Dutch rural tourism entrepreneurs and countryside capital in Sweden

Abstract

This article contrasts Sweden's tourism policy considering sustainable growth and increased employment with experiences and evaluations of Dutch rural tourism entrepreneurs in Sweden. The study employs notions of countryside capital, investigating the effects on Dutch rural tourism entrepreneurs of experiences with Swedish national tourism policy aims and local populations. A tourism-migration nexus occurs where the entrepreneurs are attracted by countryside capital before migration and use this capital in their firms to attract new tourists after migration. Interviewees tell of experiences which frustrate optimal utilization of countryside capital. In combination with flexible attitudes conceptualized as multi-local living and strategic switching, this results in the risk of losing the entrepreneurs' socio-economic impetus for lagging rural areas. The article relates this loss to incomers' rural tourism business transfers after the initial start-up phase and questions the alleged transition from countrysides of production to countrysides of consumption.

Keywords:

• consumption
• interviews
• lifestyle migration
• local development
• production

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to the participants in the fieldwork in Swedish Värmland and to Martin Hedlund for his assistance with cartography.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Swedish Research Council for Environment, Agricultural Sciences and Spatial Planning (Formas): the grant Research leaders of the future in the area Rural Development (project: Mobilising the rural: Post-productivism and the new economy).