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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.

This article studies the relation between territorial and functional planning by investigating the Swedish local comprehensive planning system and the forest management. The former is locally based and the latter is functionally based or sector-orientated. By interviewing planners from the County Administrative Boards responsible for monitoring the national interests in the Swedish municipalities and forest managers from the Regional Forest Agency Administration, we found out that forest- and municipality related issues that coincide or interact with each other is normally considered in the collaborative planning process based on consultations and cooperation between the involved stakeholders. Weaknesses in the collaborative planning system consists of lack of coordination between the involved legal frameworks as well as lack of local planning resources and in some cases competences. 

There is extensive literature describing the mechanisms of economic growth, which has tended to occur in big cities. The emergence of knowledge economies has enhanced the importance of human capital - the success of companies is increasingly dependent on employees' ability to transform their knowledge and skills into new products that can satisfy rapidly changing demand from all over the world. This transformation of the economy creates major challenges for regions that do not have large, well-educated populations. Will rural areas stand a chance against the centripetal forces of agglomeration economies? This issue is addressed by focusing attention on a number of successful, forest-related companies running their operations far from metropolitan Sweden. This presentation is accompanied by a theoretical discussion that challenges the urban assumption.

This chapter describes and analyses overlapping planning structures and multi-level planning issues and how they affect current land use and management in the forest landscape. Forest land use in Sweden is based on a large proportion of privately owned forests with the primary purpose of producing timber for the forest industries. Nevertheless, the forests are also characterised by multiple uses and many stakeholders (economic as well as ecological and social) who express themselves and relate to forest management. In this chapter, we present a number of methods, both traditional and more recent, for managing multiple use of the forest landscape. These range from physical planning and the Swedish Right of Public Access to Natura 2000, forest certification, reindeer-husbandry plans, and scenario techniques.

This chapter describes how understandings of the "rural" have progressed from a focus on either decline or amenity, whereby these more simplified understandings can be seen to have had an impact on rural policy development. The chapter argues that rural areas, including forests, need to be understood in relation to both production and integration with urban landscapes. It thus illustrates the role of both historical processes and policy in creating current understandings of the rural: drawing upon an example from the Swedish case, it amongst others shows that a redistributive tax system has played a larger and more crucial role than rural policy in retaining active rural areas in Sweden.

Forest use in Sweden may be seen as constituting an essentially conflicted area, in which a number of actors positionthemselves. Based on a review of policy documents, this study reviews discourses on forest amongst majororganisational actors between 2001 and 2011, with the aim of discussing the ways in which discourse may havechanged following increasing criticism of the previously dominating production paradigm during the period. Thestudy also discusses the ways in which forest discourses at present may also exclude areas that are relevant to forestplanning. Results illustrates the continuous role of, on the one hand, production and private ownership discoursesamong the forest industry, and, on the other, conservation and public access discourses, among environmental andother NGOs. Large differences thus continue to exist despite the double aim towards production and protection inSwedish forest law. Areas that are not directly related to this nexus although related to land use at large, such asmunicipal planning, on the other hand, are largely absent from discourse even if, for instance, shore planning andwind power issues that are related to municipal planning are taken up.

This paper presents a total survey of the characteristics and changes over time (1990–2010) within the entire population of Swedish non-industrial private forest owners (NIPF owners). By charting the changed demographic, socio-economic and geographic profile of the NIPF owners, it also provides a baseline for a discussion and analysis of potential implications for forest management, policy and values. NIPF owners differ in important ways from the general population of Sweden. However, the gap has narrowed over time with regard to, e.g., educational level and sex composition. The ongoing urbanization process is evident in the growing share of non-residential NIPF owners who live at a distance from their forest property and who differ from their residential (rural) peers through, e.g., higher education, higher income and a higher prevalence of co-ownership of their forest holdings. Although these changes might translate into updated views on forest values among NIPF owners, there could be a delay before this impacts on forest management practices and output.

Factors influencing teachers’ selection of content in geography teaching is a fundamental didactic matter.1 The purpose of the present study was to investigate whether Swedish geography teachers’ informal and formal experiences have influenced their interest in geography and if so, in what way. The results disclosed that informal experiences like outings, holidays, and childhood memories have a significant impact. The results also revealed that childhood experiences might increase the comprehension of how nature and mankind are connected, and how various places differ. Selective traditions showed to be strong, i.e. geographic names and map reading were prioritized while at excursions, physical geography was particularly dominating. We argue that in the geography teacher education, didactics should include methods for field studies, giving emphasis also to the part dealing with human geography. Forthcoming teachers need to reflect on how to make didactic choices in order to renounce the selective traditions in the subject. 

Multifunctionality has emerged as the dominant framework for understanding rural socioeconomic landscapes. The central claim of multifunctionality – that rural regions need to be understood as being made up of more than just traditional uses – has led to the incorporation of new rural activities into regional development plans, e.g., tourism. In some places, such post-productive activity is perceived to be slowly replacing productive uses of the land, e.g., agriculture/forestry. However, there is limited empirical evidence to support such claims. Drawing on previous research and data from the Swedish countryside this paper shows that, even as the number of persons employed within traditional activities decreases, the economic output per areal unit and per labour hour is increasing over time and traditional uses still occupy the majority of rural space. Hyper-production is introduced as a new metric for understanding multifunctional regions going forward. The complementary union of economic mainstays, such as agriculture, and newer activities with more quality-of-life benefits, such as tourism, is highlighted in terms of economic diversification, job creation and local social capital development, while the conflict-prone intersection of these two modes is also acknowledged. Understanding hyper-production as a key metric of multifunctionality is thus argued as integral to planning and developing resilient rural regions now and for the future.