Call for Papers: European Journal of Risk Regulation (Scopus, Web of Science, HeinOnline) Special Issue on the Contested Governance of Data Centres

The European Journal of Risk Regulation (EJRR) invites contributions to a special issue titled The Contested Governance of Data Centres: The Law, Politics and Materiality of AI, guest edited by Alberto Alemanno (HEC Paris) and Kristina Irion (University of Amsterdam).

The rapid expansion of generative AI, cloud computing and cryptocurrency is driving unprecedented demand for data centres. Governments increasingly treat these facilities as essential infrastructure and compete to attract them through accelerated permitting, public subsidies and preferential access to energy and land, while communities are beginning to contest their demands on electricity, water and territory and the secrecy surrounding their environmental and fiscal consequences. Because AI is experienced as weightless, the data centre is where it becomes visible and thus governable. As the call puts it, to govern the data centre is, in tangible form, to govern AI itself.

The controversy extends beyond the scale of the footprint to the allocation of authority: who decides whether and where data centres are built, which resources they may consume, what information operators must disclose, and whose interests their expansion serves. The issue positions itself within the emerging field of critical data centre studies and connects it to risk regulation.

EJRR is a leading peer-reviewed interdisciplinary journal published quarterly by Cambridge University Press, connecting scholars and practitioners since 2009. It examines how risks to citizens' health, safety, privacy and the environment are regulated across policy domains globally, covering new technologies, environmental degradation, pharmaceuticals, food and consumer products, financial regulation, natural disasters and terrorism.

• ISSN: 1867-299X (Print), 2190-8249 (Online)
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press, which owns, manages and publishes the journal
• Frequency: 4 issues per year
• Editor-in-Chief: Professor Alberto Alemanno
• Indexing: Scopus, Clarivate Web of Science (Emerging Sources Citation Index), DOAJ, ERIH PLUS, HeinOnline, JSTOR, ProQuest and Westlaw, per the journal's own abstracting and indexing page

• The evidence base on the environmental footprint of water, energy, emissions and land, including sustainability metrics (PUE, WUE, ERF, REF), disclosure gaps, and the politics of environmental data that shape what can be known
• Embodied and operational carbon, waste heat and cooling, and the gap between corporate net-zero pledges and rising emissions
• Critical raw materials and the circular economy: recyclability and recycled-content obligations, e-waste retention, and whether host states can require materials to remain in the loop domestically
• Carbon and water offsetting schemes and the interface between regulation and pliable private standardisation such as the GHG Protocol and the Science Based Targets initiative
• Grid connection, priority access and curtailment, and the competition between data-centre load and decarbonisation and electrification goals
• Energy-supply strategies (behind-the-meter, off-grid, nuclear and SMR) and the planning-law instruments that govern siting, including environmental impact assessment, water-abstraction rights, land-use law and fast-track permitting

• The regulatory architecture: national competence over siting and energy versus EU harmonisation, from Energy Efficiency Directive reporting to the proposed Digital Networks Act and the Cloud and AI Development Act, alongside competition to attract capital through state aid, tax incentives and FDI screening, including the announced versus built gap
• Market concentration among hyperscalers and control over the AI capacity data centres house; digital trade deficits between receiving states and states where infrastructure operators are headquartered; power beyond ownership and its implications for competition and resilience
• The sovereignty contradiction: physical presence versus extraterritorial legal reach such as the CLOUD Act, and why data localisation may not confer data sovereignty
• Supply chains, chips and siting arbitrage toward Africa, the Gulf and other emerging locations; digital sovereignty and strategic autonomy as rhetoric and as regulatory programme
• Ownership of data centre sites, circular investment in AI infrastructure and overcapacities; organisational models underpinning digital sovereignty and public values, such as cooperatives, steward ownership and not-for-profit associations
• The orbital frontier: space-based data centres, jurisdiction under the Outer Space Treaty, and whether off-world siting escapes terrestrial environmental and data-governance rules

• Disclosure and its obstacles: reporting obligations, confidentiality clauses, freedom-of-information regimes and the Aarhus Convention; the design of reporting obligations and the consequences of low compliance
• Regulatory capture as a mechanism, and how industry participation shapes the rules that govern it
• The role of private standardisation of data centre sustainability, its stakeholders, and its influence on regulation
• Liability for harms ranging from water depletion, grid failure and noise to health, and developer litigation against municipalities that chills local regulatory action

• The transatlantic asymmetry: active civic resistance in the United States and its comparative absence, or emergence, in Europe
• The premise that AI can accelerate decarbonisation and other sustainable practices versus the environmental footprint of AI, AI environmental impact assessments, and minimum performance requirements for AI
• The legality of national and local moratoria under EU law, from grid-connection refusal grounds to free movement and non-discrimination, traced through Ireland's shift from permissive to restrictive connection policy and the litigation it has provoked
• Conflicts between digitalisation and sustainability at regional, national and local levels; emergent forms of local refusal, from moratoria and zoning exclusions to the prospect of data-centre-free municipalities, community benefit agreements and the distribution of costs
• Media framing, political entrepreneurship and regulatory coalitions; sunset clauses, review mechanisms and adaptive governance under rapid build-out and contested evidence

The call is open to academics, researchers and practitioners worldwide and carries no institutional or national restriction. The editors state that they particularly encourage submissions from early-career researchers, including PhD candidates and postdoctoral scholars.

Contributions from disciplines beyond law and public policy are expressly welcomed, including economics, political science, geography, environmental science, and science and technology studies. The list of thematic clusters is indicative and not exhaustive.

• Stage 1, abstract: no more than 500 words, outlining the research question, the theoretical and/or methodological approach, the main argument and, where relevant, the empirical material or case studies
• Stage 2, full paper: generally between 8,000 and 10,000 words including footnotes, and it must comply with the EJRR author guidelines
• Review: all submissions are subject to double-blind peer review in accordance with EJRR's standard procedures
• Publication: the special issue is expected to be published in Autumn 2027

There is no fee to submit an abstract. EJRR is a wholly gold open access journal, so all articles are published open access under a Creative Commons licence and an article processing charge of GBP 2,610 / USD 3,655 (additional taxes may apply) can arise on acceptance. Cambridge states that no author will face a financial barrier to publication: in many cases the APC is covered by an institutional open access agreement, Cambridge funds full APC waivers for corresponding authors from over 100 low- and middle-income countries, and any other corresponding author may request a discount or a full waiver after editorial acceptance. The decision to accept a paper rests solely with the Editor and is taken without reference to the author's funding situation.

Abstracts and inquiries should be emailed to the EJRR Executive Manager at wirajendi@hec.fr on or before 1 October 2026.