Emil Sandström

My research and teaching interests revolve around theories related to resource governance and rural change. I study how people organize around natural resources and act in relation to changing political landscapes, new environmental conditions, and investigate how this impinges on environmental governance and peoples access to resources. My work is interdisciplinary in character and embrace perspectives found in political science, anthropology, agrarian history and rural sociology.

My research spans a variety of rural resource governance contexts—including water, forestry, agriculture, nature and biodiversity conservation—across both the Global North (primarily Sweden) and the Global South (notably East Africa and the Nile Basin). Over the years, I have investigated how institutions shape the governance and transformation of natural resources and how these dynamics inform broader processes of rural change. Drawing on insights from critical institutionalism, I explore how institutions for resource governance emerge, evolve, and are continually reshaped. In this line of work, I engage with theories of governance, commons, and participation, examining how different resource dilemmas are interpreted and handled in both policy and practice (in e.g. biosphere reserve management, nature conservation, agrobiodiversity governance and water politics). My focus lies in understanding how governance arrangements co-evolve through processes of reinvention and contestation, and how various forms of micro-level politics operate within—and potentially transform—broader policy frameworks and institutional structures. Together, these lines of inquiry reflect a broader interest in how rural environments are governed, transformed, and contested amid global pressures and localized struggles.

A crosscutting theme in my work concerns how commons function and reproduce across time and space—both as arenas of contestation and as spaces of collaboration. In recent research, I engage with the concept of commoning, framing the commons not as static resources but as dynamic, socially embedded processes that emerge through the everyday reproduction of community. This perspective emphasizes the inherently blurred and negotiated character of the commons—neither solely legal-economic entities nor mere objects of competition, but also deeply social resources that bind people together through shared practices and purposes. By conceptualizing the commons in this way, I seek to move beyond conventional understandings in how resource dilemmas can be understood by emphasizing how specific places and materialities are reproduced and co-constructed through practices of commoning.

Currently I am leading a Formas funded research project (Gröna vågen vänder åter) that explores the scope and impact of back-to-the-land migration - a phenomenon where individuals and households, often from non-agrarian and urban backgrounds, relocate to rural areas to engage in small-scale cultivation and adopt lifestyles centered on self-sufficiency, sustainability, and rural renewal. The project investigates how back-to-the-land unfolds as a social movement, and how it connects to broader questions of rural change and resistance to dominant models of industrial agriculture. By examining the motivations, practices, and narratives of back-to-the-land actors, the project aims to understand not only the personal and ideological drivers behind such rural resettlement, but also its wider implications for rural development, land use, and alternative food systems. This includes an analysis of how the movement interact with local communities, reshape rural imaginaries, and potentially contribute to more diversified and resilient agrarian landscapes. Currently, I am also coordinating a book project on local economy and I am the SLU coordinator for the VR-funded research project on Decolonizing Research Methodologies.  

If you want to know more about my work, you can find some of my publications here:

Google Scholar

Research Gate

Within the broad scope of rural development studies and environmental governance, I have taught and developed courses for more than 20 different courses at both undergraduate and graduate levels for e.g. the Master’s programme in Rural Development and Natural Resource Management, the Agronomy programme in Rural Development and in PhD courses. Currently I am involved in teaching and coordination for the following courses:

1.      Sustainable Natural Resource Management (15 credit course)

2.      Governance of Natural Resources (15 credit course)

3.      Introductory course in Rural Development (15 credit course)

In 2022, I was awarded the Distinguished Teacher promotion by the university and in 2025 the student union appointed me as Primus Inspector (an honoree and supportive role of the student union of the university)

Doctoral supervision

I supervise and examine doctoral, master’s, and bachelor’s theses on a regular basis, working with students from diverse disciplinary backgrounds, supporting critical, interdisciplinary approaches to rural transformations and resource politics.

Nora Wahlström: Prel title. Back-to-the-land and the cultivation of a new rurality?  Exploring contemporary back-to-the-land migration in Sweden. Ongoing, main supervisor

Tove Ortman: New potentials in old varieties: Using landrace cereal to meet food production. Finished 2023, co-supervisor.

Linus Karlsson: At the limits of state governance: Territory, property and state making in Lenje Chiefdom, rural Zambia. Finished 2020, co-supervisor. 

Stefan Granlund: The Promise of Payday: Exploring the role of state cash transfers in postapartheid rural South Africa. Finished 2020, co-supervisor. 

Raj Chongtham: Understanding crop and farm management: Links to farm characteristics, productivity, biodiversity, marketing channels and perceptions of climate change. Finished 2016, co-supervisor. 

Besides teaching and research in the subject fields of natural resource governance and rural development, I have worked with research based assignments and policy commissions in different capacities and for different organisations e.g. the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency, Sida, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Swedish Forestry Board, the Swedish Agricultural Board and County Boards.