Our resources thrust participants into the heart of real-world scenarios, from crisis management in the UK during the Covid-19 pandemic to cross-party education reform in Brazil.
Many of our resources are available on The Case Centre distribution platform. Educators who are registered with the site can access free review copies of our case studies, teaching notes, and other materials.
To inquire about our other cases or background materials, please contact us at casecentre@bsg.ox.ac.uk.
Building Schools in Cássio
This role-play centres around a school shortage in the fictional Brazilian municipality of Cássio. The municipality wants to build schools through a public-private partnership, but has come to an impasse over the price with the leading bidder, Plano Inteligente. In this short two-party, multi-issue negotiation, students role-play a negotiation between the municipal secretary of education and the managing director of Plano to introduce them to the dynamics of integrative negotiations.
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.
- Identify, analyse and participate in integrative negotiations;
- Understand importance of negotiation on the basis of interests instead of positions;
- Distinguish between integrative (value-creating) and distributive (value-claiming) moves.
FSO Safer: negotiating to avoid disaster
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.
- Practice and reflect upon key negotiation moves, skills and potential obstacles in a multi-party, multi-issue complex negotiation;
- Explore and experience themes related to negotiating in a high-stakes, public-sector setting across conflict lines.
Sign here: politics and integrity in public administration
When Jay Adan, the most senior civil servant in his state’s Ministry of Internal Affairs, discovered irregularities in the selection of candidates for posts in his ministry, he suspected the minister may have interfered for his own political gain. Should Adan compromise his values by approving a corrupt process or risk his career and the valuable work he was doing by explicitly rejecting the list?
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.
- Understand and explore different moral frameworks with which to approach a dilemma of institutional integrity;
- Consider various strategies for responding to a corrupt request in public service and the compromises each may entail;
- Develop an understanding of one's own values as they relate to public sector leadership.