About EPHEMERAL

Project Aim and Objectives
EPHEMERAL is designed to fundamentally advance entrepreneurship-led rural development in Europe. This aim will be achieved through three objectives. (i) Train a new generation of rural researchers to become changes agents for and in rural areas in Europe. (ii) Develop a new multi-level and temporal understanding of rural entrepreneurship that goes beyond the current state of the art characterised by neo-endogenous and static models of rural entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial ecosystems (EEs). And, (iii) as part of the ESR projects and building on the new theoretical insights, the project will deliver new tools and policy instruments for entrepreneurship-led rural development in Europe, sensitive to the temporal dynamics of rural places and rural entrepreneurship.

Rationale: Advancing Rural Development in Europe
Our interest in rural places and rural economies reflects Europe-wide calls for stronger, connected, resilient and prosperous rural areas and communities with huge potential to contribute towards economic, social and environmental goals.3 Urban areas too are dependent on rural areas in many inter-related ways.4 To advance rural development in Europe, and inform global debates, tomorrow’s researchers must embrace interdisciplinary methods designed to reflect multiple and overlapping contexts of time, space, politics, inequality, technological advances and economic change. This requires researchers trained to understand and collaborate across disciplines and regions, and to work in diverse partnerships beyond academia to co-create new knowledge and share learning and best practices.

Training and Research Environment
The project establishes a strong inter-disciplinary team of experienced supervisor from the fields of economic geography, rural sociology and entrepreneurship. This makes the project ideally placed to support the ESR candidates to generate new knowledge and insights for rural audiences. Deep immersion in rural places and action learning challenges, co-developed with non-academic partners across Europe’s rural regions, will enhance the training and societal impact of the project by developing and testing new concepts and theories in committed research-practice partnerships.

Innovative Theoretical Framework
The distinctive contribution of EPHEMERAL is the addition of a strong temporal sensitivity to the contextualised dynamics of entrepreneurship-led rural development, integrating the temporal dynamics of the life stages and life cycles of entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial ventures, the evolving nature of rural places shaped by entrepreneurial agency over time, and the fundamental structural shifts in rural areas. These shifts are caused by a range of factors including technological advancements, digitalisation, new modes of working, and climate mitigation investments that create temporary shifts in the opportunity infrastructure of rural places.

Temporal and Multi-Level Dynamics of Rural Change
While entrepreneurial opportunities are fleeting and transitory, places too are always changing. In this context, entrepreneurs create and develop enterprises that support the continuity and development of rural society. Focusing on entrepreneurship as embedded in places and societal structures, EPHEMERAL emphasizes that relationships between businesses, rural places and society evolve over time, each shaping the other’s development in multiple ways. Previous research has focused on the embeddedness of businesses in place, the value of place-based resources and the local environment, size and accessibility of markets, the (in)congruence of business and place identities and the overall importance of “context” for entrepreneurship. However, there is a significant gap in understanding about how relationships between entrepreneurship, place and society change over time. This includes a) the micro-level development through the life stages of the entrepreneur, and the life cycles of their ventures, b) the meso-level evolvement of rural places e.g. as communities age or in-migrants infuse new entrepreneurial creativity, and c) the temporary changes to the spatial distribution of opportunities and resources that occur with structural level changes or shocks at the societal level such as pandemics, climate change, new digital technologies or new modes of working. The project thus seeks to explore the following overall research question: How do entrepreneurs shape rural places as embedded in societal structures over time?

Entrepreneurs as Key Drivers of Rural Development
Entrepreneurs, defined as creators and leaders of businesses and social enterprises, are pillars of the socioeconomic and socio-cultural structure in rural areas. 6 Their diversity is fundamental to shaping new development trajectories and to sustaining rural livelihoods and places, hence their centrality to EPHEMERAL. The distinct temporal and multi-level dynamics of this research question require new research and a new generation of researchers who, through our Training Programme and integrated experiences of working with entrepreneurs,  policymakers, local communities and other rural stakeholders, can advance future rural development theory and practice.

Conceptual Approach and Study Areas
The project’s name reflects our novel contribution to theories of rural place identity, rural entrepreneurship and EEs by introducing a critical time dimension: EPHEMERAL: lasting for only a short time; transitory; short-lived. (Collins Dictionary)

At the overall project level, we theoretically advance research by capturing the representational, social and material elements of place from a Lefebvrian perspective where places are seen as constantly evolving through renegotiations. Furthermore, we apply Halfacree’s model of rural space as a synthesis of material space, lived experiences and social representations7 to highlight the intertwining and evolving nature of rural people and places. Accordingly, a strict definition of ‘rural’ has been deliberately avoided here since the research will encourage participants to self-define their rural contexts. The selection of study areas will be guided by national and transnational delineations, and our research design will look beyond those boundaries to investigate networks, representations and other linkages that stretch across statistically and politically determined lines on maps.

Policy Relevance and Societal Impact
What is distinctive about EPHEMERAL is the incorporation of multi-level and temporal dynamics of place-making in rural areas. This adds to the existing research on the role of rural entrepreneurship in place, by exploring how these processes are embedded not just in places and communities, as has been the focus of neo-endogenous models, but in temporal dynamics and broader societal structures. The important dynamics of establishing new and fruitful representations of the rural at the societal level (upwards pointing vertical arrow of the model) and developing new and valuable lives in the rural enabled by entrepreneurial creativity drawing resources from societal and place levels (downward vertical arrow in the model below) represent absolute necessities if research is to advance entrepreneurship-led rural development in a time of radical changes at the societal level related to e.g. digitalisation, regional inequalities, climate adaptation and mitigation, migration and post-COVID changes to modes of work, to name some of the current dynamics that rural areas must deal with. Without this new perspective, the enormous potential of rural entrepreneurship will continue to be marginalised by urban-centric policies, missing out on its economic value and simultaneously weakening the social fabric of rural communities and cohesion in the European Union.