Johan Sandberg is currently affiliated with the Department of Sociology, Lund University in Sweden where he is the Director of Studies for the Master in International Development and Management program (LUMID), an internationally renowned development practice oriented program with membership in the network of Global Master’s in Development Programs (MDP), coordinated by the Earth Institute at Columbia University. He was a Visiting Research Fellow at CMD during 2015-2016, pursuing post-doc research on social policy transformations towards social investments, while initiating research on high-skilled migration in Scandinavia.

His current research focuses on the increased use of behavioral conditionality in social policies and its effects on social norms, while also collaborating in CMD-driven research on STEM and high-skilled migration.

His PhD-research on conditional cash transfers (CCTs) entailed extensive fieldwork in Uruguay and Guatemala. Using a mixed-methods approach, he applied new institutional theory to investigate policy diffusion and the role of CCTs in recent Latin American social policy developments, and explanatory mechanisms in economic sociology to analyze the programs’ unintended consequences. His work culminated in PhD thesis defense on April 10, 2014 and his work has been published in peer-review journals such as Development and Change, Development Policy Review, Social Policy & Administration, and Global Social Policy.