An Australian first: Southern Highlands community sets new terms for data centre development

Résumé détaillé

The Fifth Estate - Australia’s need for data centres is largely a settled question. Cloud services and AI run on them, and there is no shortage of investment or political will…

Australia’s need for data centres is largely a settled question. Cloud services and AI run on them, and there is no shortage of investment or political will behind them. Where they go and on what terms is far less settled. Three questions stand out: what must be protected in the areas in which they’re built, what lasting value should the host community receive, and who governs how these decisions are made.

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In the New South Wales Southern Highlands, one community has just put forward its answers. On Sunday 25 October, residents presented their federal, state and local representatives with what is believed to be Australia’s first deliberative model on data centres. It came out of A Better Model for Data Centre Development, a community-led pilot in Wingecarribee Shire.

Four partners shaped the work. Highlands Homegrown Economy, a community initiative co-convened by local climate group WinZero, provided local knowledge and networks.

Regen Labs, a place-based economic development lab, prepared tangible examples of community wealth-building around major infrastructure projects and fed what residents agreed on into the model. RadicalxChange, a global participatory governance foundation, designed and ran the deliberation, using civic technology. BWD Strategic provided an independent four capitals assessment to help inform community discussions.

One key challenge with current data centre proposals is that they usually arrive with one number: the capital required to build them. That figure says little about what a data facility extracts from a place, or what it could leave behind.

Using the Capitals Coalition’s Integrated Decision-making framework, the assessment looked at how a data centre affects other kinds of capitals such as air, water and land (natural capital), people and communities (human capital) and relationships, rules and institutions (social capital).

The research…

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