He held the chair for anthropology at the Department of Social Sciences from 2001 to 2022 and was the founding director of the Centre for African Studies at the University of Basel (Switzerland).

His habilitation thesis was published under the title "Disrupted evolvement: everyday life, ritual and artistic forms of expression in northern Côte d'Ivoire" (in German.

First as seconded development expert for integrated rural development of the German Agency for International Cooperation GmbH (gtz) and the "Credit Institute for Reconstruction" (KfW) in Niger (1984–1985), as an expert on irrigated rice cultivation and land rights conflicts in the Ivory Coast (1984) and as a specialist for the social use of Biogas plants in the Ivory Coast and Burkina Faso.

His early scholarly interest thus drew on a basic finding: Because development programmes and projects did not take local knowledge and practice into account, they often failed.

The politics of governance, development, and long-term societal transformations had been at the centre of his research (mainly) in Ivory Coast and Cameroon), as well as his teaching since the beginning of his academic career.

For Förster, governance denotes political processes of coordinated collective action between both state and non-state actors to identify and resolve complex societal problems.