Partnership arrangements in order to achieve sustainable economic growth is nowadays a more and more common feature of developing strategies in different sectors of modern society. This is also the case in the tourism sector, where value of tourism for destination development is highlighted. Many of these partnership arrangements are formalized through the concept of the "network". Although there are usually several aims, the declared purpose of collaboration in a network or partnership is almost always to create synergy or added value. The members of the network are realizing that they have a common goal, which cannot be reached if they act individually. Instead, if the members pool their resources and act together the probability to reach the goal increases. Sometimes situations arise when actors take advantage of what others give, but do not themselves contribute equally (network problems arise in the form of "free riders"). This can then create an attitude in the network where members are reluctant to communicate experience and information to other members and then the mutual exchange of experience that is so important for successful networks can be lost. Hence, it is important to acknowledge that a network beside cooperation also may include a competitive dimension.

Even if scholars have studied tourism networks in general, methods of how to evaluate tourism networks have been relatively neglected as an area of academic study. In this respect, the objective of the present paper was to study performance of a tourism network. The case of our study is a partnership called Network Limfjorden, which is a cooperation with the aim to develop the tourism around Limfjorden in Denmark. The network was established in 1995 and consists of two regions, eight municipalities and tourist offices around Limfjorden. The tourism activities in the Limfjorden region can be characterized as "slow" activities. In spring 2010 Network Limfjorden, adopted a new action plan "Towards 2015". The action plan states that the Limfjorden continues to be a strong brand. This will be achieved through:

• Development of coherent useful products and activities
• Launch projects and develop until they can run on their own
• Marketing of products and activities under the common brand
• A concerted effort to promote network development

These goals are conventional for most networks. In order to study if the different network partners are committed to use and express the common branding one can study either what is said or written. We have chosen to study written material and in this case the traditional tourism brochures. Because branding, beyond its own operations, is about describing the common; common values, specific joint projects developed etc. Our study includes five tourism brochures from five municipalities around Limfjorden. We operationalized the study of brochures with the following measures:

• The portion of sentences with a "network umbrella description". Such a sentence includes for instance a description of an area or an activity outside their own municipal but within the network area Limfjorden.
• Yes/No whether or not the brochure include: the network logo, the address to the network website, map over the Limfjorden area, common launched network activities (old sail ship regatta, storytelling, etc.)

In this way we examined to what extent a network member (municipality) in its own brochure promotes i) their own activities, and ii) other members' activities.  The results of the study indicate that it is more common to promote the own specific activity or location even if similar activities can be found also in other municipalities around Limfjorden. Several partners did not include network logo, link to website or common network activities. Consequently, the opportunity to create positive synergy effects among the network partners is not fully exploited. The macro perspective found among the aims with the network, was simply not adopted by several partners. Perhaps this may be explained by a lack of understanding and handling the balance between cooperation and competition. In conclusion, even though the network were ambitious and had well thought-thrown aims, our findings indicate that these ambitions were not successfully adopted by partners. This might well be the reason for why it was decided to discontinue the network.