CECAN Fellowship: Participatory Systems Mapping for Place-Based Evaluation of Data Centre Infrastructure
As demand for digital infrastructure grows, data centres are increasingly shaping local resource systems through their impacts on energy demand, water use, and heat generation. Despite this, they are often planned and evaluated as isolated technical infrastructure rather than as embedded components of a wider “place-based” system. Current evaluation approaches struggle to capture the interdependencies between data centres, local infrastructure, environmental pressures, and community experiences. This fellowship will explore how systems methodologies might support more holistic evaluation of data centre integration within local areas. In particular, it will investigate whether Participatory Systems Mapping (PSM) and Fuzzy Cognitive Mapping (FCM) can help reveal relationships between digital infrastructure, local resource resilience, and social outcomes. The fellowship is especially interested in how place-based and participatory approaches might surface perspectives that are often overlooked in infrastructure planning, including the uneven local impacts of water stress, energy demand, and opportunities such as waste heat reuse. Through engagement with the CECAN network, the fellowship will explore how systems-based evaluation approaches could contribute to more adaptive and locally responsive infrastructure governance.
About Olya
Olya K-Mehri is a policy specialist and researcher whose work sits at the nexus of systems thinking, public policy, and public sector delivery. She advises government departments and public bodies on complex place-based challenges, with particular expertise in impact evaluation, resilience planning, and the just transition.
Her work brings together strategic policy advice with extensive experience designing and delivering programmes that address cross-cutting issues spanning energy infrastructure, resource management, and regional development. She works with organisations to bridge policy ambition and delivery, translating long-term priorities into practical, implementable approaches that strengthen community resilience and enable more equitable place-making.
Olya combines this applied experience with an academic background in environmental ethics, political theory, and sustainable finance. Alongside her role as Assistant Director of Climate at Local Partnerships LLP, she leads the Centre for Climate, Migration and Place at the Institute of Domestic Violence, Religion and Migration (IDVRM), where her research focuses on the intersections of climate vulnerability, migration, and environmental justice.
