His background is in agricultural, environmental, ecological, and institutional economics with long experience in teaching these subjects. He wrote his PhD thesis analysing the emergence of property rights of the indigenous Sami people and exploring its role for conflict resolution with other stakeholders in northern Sweden. He was awarded a PhD at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences at Uppsala in 2001.

His advisor was Professor Daniel W. Bromley at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he spent part of his time as a PhD student. At present his main research focus is the role of governance networks and social capital for collaborative environmental management and adaptive governance of social-ecological systems. This is a truly transdisciplinary research area. His case study Kristianstads Vattenrike (Kristianstad Wetlands) was approved as a sub-global assessment within The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment and he was a coordinating lead author of Chapter 9 (Responses) of the Multiscale Assessment Volume.

In 2006 he received € 206,000 from the EU-Commission for participating in a 2-year project "Governance and Ecosystems Management for the CONservation of BIOdiversity" (GEM-CON-BIO). Together with researchers at Lund University and SLU Uppsala he received a 5-year grant (Strong research environment) from Formas starting in 2010 focusing on multilevel governance of ecosystem services in agricultural landscapes.

He has presented his research at several international conferences and actively disseminated the results of The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment for the Swedish Environmental Advisory Board, the Swedish Parliament and the Swedish EPA among others.

He is a member of the International Society for Ecological Economics. He regularly reviews articles for the journals Ecology & Society and Ecological Economics, and occasionally for Nature and Society, Ecosystems, Forest Policy and Economics, Environmental Science and Policy, and Global Environmental Change.

He is also a board member of Sveaskog AB, the largest forest owner in Europe and former chairman of the Swedish organisation Economists for Sustainability, which is a branch of The Natural Step.