Paul publishes data center negotiation simulation
A data center in Coleraine, Northern Ireland. Photo: Geoffrey Moffett / Unsplash
Sanjana Paul has released a new simulation that allows participants to engage in multi-party negotiations around a proposed data-center. Using eight different roles, participants explore the implications of energy, water, community benefits, and permitting. Designed for practitioners and graduate courses in planning and policy, this tool poses questions that have been important to communities for a long time, under new circumstances.
“The questions data centers raise aren't new,” Sanjana reflected on LinkedIn. “Who decides where infrastructure goes? Who absorbs the risk? What does a community actually get in return? There are hundreds of active data center proposals with these questions unresolved across the United States and the world right now.”
The simulation is available for free to educators through the Program on Negotiation Teaching Multi‑Party Negotiation on Energy, Environment, and Community Impacts, a university consortium dedicated to developing the theory and practice of negotiation and dispute resolution across Harvard, MIT and Tufts.
