Dr. Julia Plessing

Julia Plessing is research fellow at RIFS since April 2021 and is currently based in the research group: ‘Democratic Governance and Action’. Until 2025, she worked for the Franco-German Forum for the Future, which fostered exchange on sustainability transformations among French and German municipalities and conducted comparative research. Since then, Julia has been working on topics of citizen participation and local sustainability transformations, climate adaptation through urban digital twins, backlash against sustainability as well as transdisciplinary knowledge co-production.

Julia studied International Relations at the University of Sussex (BA) and the Universiteit van Amsterdam (MA) and spent several years working in civil society initiatives committed to combating far-right extremism. From 2006 to 2020, she worked in development cooperation in southern Africa and completed her PhD on citizen participation in disadvantaged communities at the University of Johannesburg in 2020.