Case Centre resources

On 9 March 2017, Preet Bharara, US Attorney for the Southern District of New York, returned to his office to see that he had missed a phone call from President Donald Trump. It was highly unusual for the President of the United States to want to speak directly with a US Attorney. Such communication was usually routed through senior intermediaries in the Department of Justice to avoid political influence in law enforcement. In this case, those intermediaries had no knowledge of the reason for President Trump’s phone call.

While senior prosecutors like Bharara were political appointees who served at the will of the appointing president, in this case, Bharara was the chief law-enforcement officer in the jurisdiction that covered much of President Trump’s personal and business interests. Bharara wanted to avoid any appearance of impropriety, but he also knew that President Trump was an unorthodox leader who sought to deal directly with subordinates and shake up government bureaucracy. Bharara was keen not to hamper legitimate communications with the new White House. He had to decide whether to return the president’s phone call in violation of Department of Justice norms.

It is July 2021 and more than 4 million people across the world have lost their lives to Covid-19. With the pandemic still raging, mass vaccination programmes have been rolled out in many countries as one essential strategy to combat the virus. However, access to vaccines is highly uneven around the globe: while rich countries have vaccinated large proportions of their populations, some low-income countries have vaccination rates of under 1%. 

In this multi-issue, multi-party negotiation role play, participants representing governments from the Global North, governments from the Global South, and pharmaceutical companies and manufacturers must work together to improve access to vaccinations. And although all parties share a common interest in seeing vaccination rates rise globally, individual and national interests diverge and finding an agreement on the best route to achieve the desired goal is extremely challenging. In the negotiation, participants must navigate shifting alliances and competing interests and must, fundamentally, develop an understanding of how to negotiate for the public good.

Co-authored with Sachin Sathyarajan and Hayley Pring.

Even though Estonia was well known as a leader in digital public services, some government departments had been less successful than others in their digitalisation efforts. In particular, the social insurance board had struggled to get their digital platform for social protection benefits off the ground: between 2017 and 2022, the project had eaten up €23 million and achieved only a quarter of its intended goals. 

This case study centres around the decision of whether to discontinue or try to salvage an unsuccessful digitalisation project. By analysing the social insurance board’s challenges to digitalisation, the case will be used to evaluate factors that contribute to unsuccessful digitalisation efforts, and in doing so, identify how governments can build up the skills to successfully digitalise.

This case study focuses on the phenomenon of pens’ blackout in Brazil where efforts to reduce corruption and increase the authority of control bodies have caused civil servants to avoid taking decisions for fear of being penalised. The case can be used to teach concepts such as how laws and control institutions can backfire by deterring honest civil servants; the role of legal uncertainty and audit; the relationship between executive and control authorities; and how to protect and promote discretion and innovation in the public service.

In June 2022, four Senators, two Republican and two Democrat, gathered in the basement of the US Senate to negotiate the details of what they hoped would become the US’s first national gun safety legislation in decades. Such bipartisan negotiations had long seemed impossible. Debates of gun-related legislation had historically been dominated by the influential National Rifle Association (NRA), which vehemently defended the right to bear arms through a large grassroots base and direct pressure on politicians. Gun safety advocates, on the other hand, had failed to convince politicians to support their mission, struggling to amass enough funding and grassroots support to influence political campaigns – even when the majority of Americans supported stricter gun laws. But gradually over the 2010s, a few large gun-safety activist groups emerged and pursued new strategies, and by the 2020s, they were seeing some political victories at the local and state level.

This had given hope to Democrat Senator Chris Murphy who had supported gun safety since 2012. But now his colleague, Republican Senator John Cornyn, threatened to walk away from the negotiations over the inclusion of ‘red flag laws’, a tool to remove guns from individuals deemed to be at extreme risk to themselves or others. The provision was championed by gun safety groups and derided by the NRA. Murphy did not want to lose this potential moment for change, and he had to figure out if he could hold the coalition together.

In November 2012, in the aftermath of the Egyptian revolution, opposition leader Mohamed ElBaradei faced a pivotal decision on his role in supporting the new democratically elected President Mohamed Morsi, a member of the Muslim Brotherhood. Though ElBaradei and other liberal and secular figures had previously supported the Brotherhood during the revolution, they were wary of the Brotherhood’s Islamist agenda. Their primary concern was the makeup of the constituent assembly responsible for drafting Egypt's new constitution, which they believed failed to represent Egypt’s diversity. Many liberal figures were threatening to boycott the assembly in protest. 

With the assembly on the brink of collapse, Morsi sought dialogue with ElBaradei and other opposition figures to reach a consensus on the constitution draft. However, ElBaradei doubted the sincerity of Morsi’s intention to form a more representative assembly. Accepting Morsi's olive branch would symbolically legitimize his government and conservative agenda, while refusing could delay constitution drafting, leaving Morsi with unchecked powers and the country vulnerable to a military takeover. As fault lines deepened between Islamists and secularists, ElBaradei grappled with the decision to accept the invitation.

Nafasia, a fictional central African country, has vast cobalt deposits, but among the lowest cobalt royalty rates in the world. As global cobalt prices skyrocket, the government seeks to renegotiate the rate with Alloy, the largest mining company operating in the country. 

This is a short two-party, single-issue negotiation over setting a mining royalty rate. Students role-play the negotiation as either the representative of the mining company or the government’s minister of mines. Through the simulation, students become familiar with distributive negotiation techniques and learn key elements of negotiation analysis (including BATNA and ZOPA).

This is a short two-party, multi-issue negotiation over a public-private partnership to build schools in Brazil. Students role-play a negotiation as either the secretary of education or the managing director of a private company. The role-play introduces students to the core features of integrative negotiations, allowing them to differentiate it conceptually from distributive negotiations.

The role-play also helps students understand the ‘negotiator’s dilemma’ and learn a range of moves that can be used to create value in a negotiation.

Off the coast of Yemen, in the Red Sea, an enormous oil tanker sat rusting in 2022. The Floating Storage and Offloading Unit (FSO) Safer contained 1.1 million barrels of oil. However, due to the ongoing Yemen civil war between Ansar Allah (also known as the Houthis) and the Saudi-backed, internationally recognised government of Yemen, the tanker had not been maintained since 2015. With the rotting hull deteriorating every day, an oil spill from the Safer was widely considered both inevitable and imminent unless prompt action is taken. The consequences of such a spill would be dire: devastating the ecology of the Red Sea region, disrupting global trade by potentially blocking the Suez Canal for months, and greatly exacerbating the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Yemen. Although the disaster seemed relatively easy to prevent from a technical perspective, political barriers had restricted progress for years and talks between Ansar Allah and the UN broke down completely in 2019. This multi-issue, multi-party negotiation simulation for groups of 6-12 players picks up the story in early 2022 when a change of UN leadership, as well as other developments in the region, had opened the door for new negotiations.

As the senior most civil servant in the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Mountain State, Jay Adan was required to approve any new recruits hired in the interior ministry. When he received a list of candidates recommended for vacant posts in the Mountain State Emergency Services, one of his ministry’s departments, he suspected that the recruitment had not been meritocratic. His personal investigation suggested that the candidates chosen were unqualified, and that more candidates were being recruited than the number of actual vacancies. Patronage was a rampant issue in the region, and political leaders frequently used recruitment cycles to garner support among voters before elections. Adan believed it was likely that the minister of internal affairs was interfering with the recruitment to recommend individuals from his key constituencies in time for elections. Adan considered it unethical to approve a corrupt process, but explicitly rejecting the list could cost him his career and jeopardise the important projects he was working on. Running out of time and options, Adan needed to decide what to do.