My research focuses on the role of informality in regard to governance and societal development, policy and laws related to natural resource management, and around the implementation of the SDGs. In recent years my research has shifted from anthropological studies of local politics to political-economic and socio-political analysis of Africa on a wider societal level. This incorporates global as well as local and national dimensions to take in the role of informality on governance, development, and societal organisation. 

To exemplify, in a DANIDA financed project I am involved in - Rights and Resilience in Kenya (RARE), I investigate the informalisation of progressive land laws and policy on climate change adaption in rural Kenya, and in another project ‘GOLD’ financed by the Independent Research Fund Denmark (FSE), I investigate relations between the role of informal and illegal resource extraction and broader processes of democratisation and state formation, together with how international guidelines and standards for sustainable resource extraction are (re)negotiated.

There are also two other projects I am developing which both focus on dimensions of local-global connectivity. The first looks at the development of N-S partnerships to establish sustainable urban water systems in the Global south, focusing on Ghana. And the second is a book project which investigates different cases around the world of global power and local struggles in the Global south today.  

Accordingly, my research seeks to understand the making and shaping of social, political, and economic power and institutions across local, national, and global levels that develop outside the immediate control of state institutions and which contribute to processes of global heterogeneity and homogeneity.