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.

This paper examines the entrepreneurial strategies and development aspirations of immigrant tourism entrepreneurs in rural Sweden, and how they support or conflict with local and regional public sector tourism strategies. Our conceptual framework contrasts the immigrant entrepreneurs’ business and lifestyle priorities with public sector responsibilities and development interests. Findings from three case studies suggest that immigrants both collaborate and compete with public sector stakeholders in different tourism destination systems. We identify mismatches in terms of economic, lifestyle and public interest goals, as well as institutional and cultural differences between immigrant entrepreneurs and public sector stakeholders that hinder effective public‐private collaboration.

This article aims to examine return reasoning among Dutch lifestyle migrant families in Hällefors, rural Sweden. It addresses two questions: after migrating to Hällefors, what influences return reasoning among Dutch families? What does this imply for return migration and transnationalism within lifestyle migration research? The questions are addressed through analysis of Dutch migrant families’ narratives, collected in 2011 and subsequent years. The findings are related to issues of transnationalism and return migration within lifestyle migration research. As many of these intra-EU urban–rural migrants are seriously considering returning, this study draws attention to temporary lifestyle migration over longer periods.

The main purpose of the article is to connect rural immigrants’ business ventures and development in Sweden to relational perspectives on their proximate and distant family and co-ethnic networks at structural and individual levels. Accordingly, the authors employ a relational approach and draw on in-depth interviews. In the context of urban–rural relationships’ meanings for the restaurateurs’ business benefits and constraints, they address two questions: (1) What does embeddedness in proximate and distant family and co-ethnic networks mean for the interviewed restaurateurs and for their businesses? and (2) How do previous and anticipated transitions in the restaurateurs’ families influence their business decisions and migration trajectories? The results suggest that the interviewees employed transnational dimensions in their social embeddedness and that they maintained material and emotional relationships with their countries of origin. This relational approach thus contributes to a better understanding of what the studied businesses mean for the entrepreneurs and the selected localities. The restaurateurs contribute to a globalisation of Swedish countrysides, but their socio-economic potential for countering rural depopulation in Sweden is not fully realised. Additionally, the study illuminates how individuals influence, and are influenced by, place-to-place mobilities on a daily basis and during their life course.