Translocal communities and their implications for place branding

This chapter takes today’s increasingly translocal lives as a starting point and analyses opportunities, as well as challenges, created for rural place branding. We study the translocal actors in community development on four Nordic islands. Taking translocal networks and engagements into account brings into view the flows of people and their resources available in translocal networks, relations and hubs of engagement – thereby highlighting a hitherto understudied aspect of the development and branding of rural places. Translocal actors pose new challenges to place-branding theory, in that they play into a community-based place governance and contribute considerably to brand renewal, but in a bottom-up and multi-local approach. Translocal networks extend the place branding concept of scale, from a single-area focus to a focus on networks and connections, which imply foci on multiple geographical areas, as well as a dynamic element of scale, thus challenging the concept of place in place branding.