This paper examines the motivations and practices of cities engaging in policy boosterism, ‘a subset of traditional branding and marketing activities that involves the active promotion of locally developed and/or locally successful policies, programs, or practices across wider geographical fields as well as to broader communities of interested peers' (McCann, 2013: 5). The paper draws together literatures on policy boosterism, policy tourism, and place branding to explore the motivations of cities sharing policies in a competitive policy environment through policy tourism. Using the case of environmental and urban sustainability policies in Växjö, Sweden, we examine how the rationale for sharing policy has changed over time, and how this both reflects and shapes the organization of policy tourism through technical visits and the branding of Växjö as ‘the greenest city in Europe’. Our study suggests that policy tourism and urban policymaking co-evolve in the context of policy boosterism. In Växjö what began as opportunistic branding now drives local environmental policymaking as the city strives to remain at the cutting edge. We suggest that detailed, longitudinal case studies are required to build a picture of the relationship between policy boosterism, policy tourism and urban policymaking in a variety of contexts.