News from the EPHEMERAL project: Understanding Rural Entrepreneurship Through Time, Place and Change

Beyond static views of rural business

According to Professor Gary Bosworth, director of the EPIC research centre at Northumbria University, EPHEMERAL is not “just another study of rural businesses.” What excites him most is the project’s ambition to understand how rural businesses shape the places in which they operate – and how those places, in turn, shape the businesses.

Across Europe, rural enterprises provide much more than jobs or economic output. They create meeting spaces, sustain services, and contribute to local identity and cohesion. Yet these social values are often invisible in economic policy and research. EPHEMERAL challenges ingrained assumptions about what counts as “productive” or “innovative” by looking closely at how businesses become embedded – and sometimes less embedded – in their localities over the course of time. “Rurality can be a constraint at certain moments,” Bosworth explains, “but at other times it becomes a source of resilience or distinctiveness.” Understanding this ebb and flow is essential if policymakers and researchers are to move beyond simplistic narratives of rural decline.

A temporal and evolutionary perspective

Time is at the core of EPHEMERAL’s theoretical innovation. For Sierdjan Koster, Professor in Economic Geography and Labour Market Dynamics at University of Groningen, the project’s long-term perspective is what truly sets it apart. EPHEMERAL explores entrepreneurial behaviour through the intersecting life courses of entrepreneurs, firms, and the regional contexts in which they operate.

This evolutionary approach is particularly timely. Rural areas are shaped by overlapping changes – from digitalisation and climate transitions to demographic shifts and new modes of working. Elisabete Figueiredo, Associate Professor in the Department of Social, Political and Territorial Sciences at Aveiro University, Portugal, is keen to emphasize the importance of changing and renewing urban-rural connections too. She notes that “we cannot study rural places without reference to the urban-rural relationships dynamics in terms of population movements, production and consumption paths, as well as politics”. EPHEMERAL does not treat any of these dynamics as background noise, but as central to understanding how opportunities emerge, disappear, and re-emerge.

Néstor Vercher, Assistant Professor at the department of applied economics at the University of Valencia, highlights that this focus on trajectories and long-term processes offers a “much-needed way of understanding how entrepreneurs and places evolve together.” Rather than freezing rural territories in time, EPHEMERAL places uncertainty, adaptation, and transformation at the heart of rural entrepreneurship research.

Interdisciplinarity in practice

EPHEMERAL brings together geographers, sociologists, business scholars and practitioners, creating a genuinely interdisciplinary research and training environment. This diversity is not only academic but deeply practical.

From Valencia, Vercher’s team focuses on social enterprises embedded in local communities, often working with vulnerable groups or pursuing environmental goals. By studying how these initiatives evolve across different rural contexts – from depopulating regions in Spain to more dynamic areas in Northern and Central Europe – the project connects theory directly to pressing societal challenges.

Across the network, doctoral researchers work closely with entrepreneurs, local governments, LEADER groups and social economy organisations. This tight connection between research, practice and policy is a defining feature of EPHEMERAL and a key strength within the Marie Skłodowska-Curie framework.

Training a new generation of rural researchers

At the heart of EPHEMERAL are nine doctoral researchers who are being trained not only as excellent academics, but as reflective, socially engaged scholars. The network’s collaborative approach to learning – through joint training weeks, interdisciplinary supervision and secondments beyond academia – opens up new trajectories for rural research.

Bosworth points out that this structure enables different types of publications, engagements and impacts, reaching audiences far beyond a single discipline. EPHEMERAL also creates space for doctoral researchers to develop skills in collaboration, policy engagement and applied research, strengthening their career prospects both inside and outside academia.

Vercher sees the doctoral candidates as “a new and highly capable generation,” equipped to navigate complexity across scales and over time. In his view, EPHEMERAL represents the future of socially useful social science: academically rigorous, deeply contextual, and committed to place and society.

Shaping future agendas

By bringing time, place and entrepreneurial agency together, EPHEMERAL aims to reshape how rural entrepreneurship is understood and supported across Europe. Its temporal and multi-level perspective provides new tools for policymakers, challenges urban-centric assumptions, and highlights the diverse ways in which rural businesses contribute to social, economic and environmental sustainability.

In doing so, EPHEMERAL is not only advancing theory, but also building a lasting European network of scholars and practitioners dedicated to understanding and shaping rural futures.