Einarsson, Torbjörn

I have a Ph.D. in Business Administration from Stockholm School of Economics and am currently affiliated with the Center for Security and Resilience (CfSR) and Stockholm Center for Civil Society Studies (SCCSS).

I have been researching civil society, membership governance, and welfare provision in federations and cooperatives. My past projects span protest movements, community-owned care, and civil society organizations’ roles in society. Among my expertise are democratic governance, member influence, and multi-level organizing and civil society actors’ role and potential in preparedness and crisis response.

Among my responsibilities, I have served as academic reviewer for the Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management and as operational secretary for the academic publisher European Civil Society Press. I am highly passionate about translating research into practice. My in-depth knowledge of both civil society and preparedness is therefore highly valuable in my roles as a local politician and board member of Coompanion Roslagen & Norrort as well as Leader Upplandsbygd.

Current research projects:

Enhancing municipal capabilities in the shadow of the war in Ukraine. A study of municipal decision-making on issues related to building civil defense. The goal is to find ways to more quickly strengthen the Swedish total defense through a better understanding of these processes.

Civil society actors for a stronger society. We analyze how civil society mobilized during the COVID pandemic and the refugee reception in 2015-2016. We also study the models for collaboration between civil society and the public sector that were used, what the organizations learned during these crises, and how organizational learning can be strengthened.

Civil society - public collaboration for community resilience hubs in rural areas. As the total defense is expanded, municipalities are finding it difficult to cover the entire rural area. Therefore, this project focuses on how the municipality can collaborate with civil society to turn familiar places such as community centers and churches into community resilience hubs (trygghetspunkter).