Beyond Visas: How National Remote-Work Policies Need Local Implementation Capacity

Abstract

A visa can create legal access, but it cannot create local capacity. This policy brief examines the gap between national remote-work policies and the municipal capacity required to make them work. Spain's international teleworker authorisation and Portugal's D8 residence visa resolved a real problem, the ambiguous legal status of medium and long-term remote residents, but a visa does not produce housing, services, integration or monitoring. The brief argues that the obligations created by national attraction policy fall almost entirely on the local level, and that the burden is heaviest precisely where institutional capacity is thinnest, which risks redirecting flows toward places that already have advantage. Drawing on OECD analysis, the literature on territorial cohesion, place-based development and territorial capital, and research on rural place branding from a multilevel perspective, it sets out a distribution of functions across national, regional, local and intermediary actors, and concludes with a practical checklist for each level.