What's place got to do with it? Collaboration among civil society actors in northern rural Sweden

Existing theories on collaboration within civil society frequently treat collaboration as detached from the specific geographical and social places where it occurs. In other words, collaborative theories tend to understate the significance of local context. Contributing to the discussion on rural civil society collaboration, this article explores how collaboration within civil society can be understood by adopting a relational perspective on place. Drawing on interviews with civil society actors, both those affiliated with an organisation and not, in northern rural Sweden—the most sparsely populated region in Europe—and using refugee reception as an empirical case, this article highlights how collaboration needs to be understood in relation to place, distance, and peripheralization. • Contributes to the literature on collaboration between rural civil actors by adopting a relational place approach. • Highlight how voluntary actions are related to processes of peripheralization. • Emphasises the importance of understanding collaboration concerning different expressions of distance. • Illustrative example of how place matters for collaborative efforts.