ACES Digital Europe Hub

Building ACES cloud for a sustainable European digital cloud

In order to promote research collaborations across the participating faculties, the Amsterdam Centre for European Studies (ACES) devotes a significant part of its budget to two-year targeted interdisciplinary research projects. These projects are led by ACES affiliates from at least two faculties and address major societal challenges in a European context and urgent issues concerning the dynamics and direction of contemporary Europe.

The ACES Digital Europe Hub project has the dual objective to:

• conduct interdisciplinary research on the case of the European politics of cloud computing and sustainable digitalization, and
• create an interdisciplinary hub for research, exchange and outreach on Digital Europe and sustainable digitalization.

Digitalization in Europe is in full swing and increasingly of strategic importance for the European project. The European digital strategy seeks to shape Europe’s digital future where “the twin challenge of a green and digital transformation has to go hand-in-hand” (European Commission 2000a). The strategy is to a significant extent premised on Europe’s self-sufficiency in key digital technologies, such as European data spaces, artificial intelligence, 5G mobile communications, cloud and quantum computing. This research project will lay the foundations for ACES research and for connecting researchers in the interdisciplinary space where digitalization and sustainability intersect in Europe. They will carry out a foundational project to study how the twin objectives of sustainability and digitalization are being shaped in European politics. Showcasing how interdisciplinary connections can be made and lead to stage-setting insights, they will simultaneously develop what is called the ACES Digital Europe Hub, with sustainability built in.

The research will be organised in four workpackages:

• WP1: European multi-level governance of cloud computing and digital sustainability;
• WP2: Businesses perspectives on European cloud computing and digital sustainability;
• WP3: Civil society perspectives on European multi-level cloud governance;
• WP4: Synthesis of actors’ perspectives and processes that shape European politics of cloud computing and sustainability.

Project leads: