Biography
Alfredo Ramos Perez is a postdoctoral researcher on the Including the More than Human in Decision Making project, led by the Sydney Environment Institute in collaboration with DemocracyNext. His research spans democratic innovations and citizen participation, critical masculinity studies, cultural policy, community-based cultural processes, and multispecies justice.
He holds a PhD in Political Science, alongside a Master’s in Participatory Research and a second Master’s in Cultural Management. Across his career, Alfredo has combined academic research with applied work in social economy initiatives, political parties, cultural project development, and advisory roles within public administrations.
For Alfredo, multispecies justice offers a way to reimagine politics and democracy. It challenges the human-centred assumptions that have traditionally defined these systems, while opening up new possibilities for responding to the complexity of today’s social and ecological crises.
About the research
Alfredo’s long-standing work on democratic innovations has consistently raised questions about how to account for the interests of nature and future generations. In practice, however, these concerns are often sidelined. His engagement with multispecies justice began during a European project on participation and ecological transition, where he encountered the artistic duo Uh513, whose work explores vegetal intelligences. Reflecting on how democratic innovation might connect with such approaches drew him into the field.
In his current role, Alfredo contributes to a program of work structured around three main strands. The first focuses on developing an inventory of good practices for including the more-than-human in decision-making processes. The second involves building a community of practice, bringing together professionals from diverse disciplines and sectors working in this space. The third strand consists of experimental projects in Australia and Europe, designed to test and evaluate different methods for representing and including the more-than-human in deliberative and participatory processes.
Together, these strands create opportunities to trial multiple approaches, assess them rigorously, and develop practical methodologies and toolkits. The project also aims to systematise existing knowledge and strengthen networks that can support ongoing work in this area.
Beyond implementation, the research explores how these approaches can be evaluated, how their impacts can be measured, and how they might more effectively address contemporary ecological and climate challenges. Grounded in multispecies justice, this work challenges human exceptionalism, expands the boundaries of the demos, and reimagines politics itself—opening up possibilities for more inclusive democratic practices and more convivial relationships with the Earth’s more-than-human others.