From project to venture: facilitating engagement and entrepreneurship in rural tourism

https://doi.org/10.1080/14616688.2025.2519331

Abstract

Projects are a standard strategy for rural tourism development. This study builds on the premise that sustainable rural tourism is conditioned by the involvement of key stakeholders and entrepreneurs’ ability to creatively and responsibly utilise local resources for tourism purposes. Accordingly, this research explores the project format as a framework for facilitating engagement and entrepreneurship. The empirical context is Visit Village, a collaborative tourism initiative in rural Sweden. This qualitative case study has followed the Visit Village project closely for nearly three years. Data was collected from observations, reviewing documents, in-depth interviews, and informal conversations. The analysis focused on the actors involved in the project, their respective roles, and the interactions between them. This study applies the Civic Wealth Creation (CWC) theoretical framework for stakeholder engagement. The framework directs the analysis to the meso level of the entrepreneurial ecosystems, where interactions generate value and promote positive social impact. The findings indicate that projects can be a fruitful setting for entrepreneurship by providing access to resources, knowledge, and support and forming communities and creative spaces; concurrently, the findings corroborate the difficulty of involving key stakeholders. The intricacy seems to lie in the incompatibility of the project format and the modus operandi of small-scale entrepreneurs and the local community. The analysis suggests generating a sense of progression, kinship, and ownership to adjust the project to the stakeholders’ logic of action. Owner-managers of local tourism businesses emerge as natural CWC promoters, and the study recommends entrusting embedded and entrepreneurial individuals with formal responsibilities in tourism projects. The analysis also underlines the need for project leaders to redefine their roles throughout the process.

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