This guest post is by Francesco Navarrini, who teaches Introduction to Political Science and European Union Negotiation at the bachelor’s level in European Studies at the University of Coimbra in Portugal. He also lectures on Professional Skills in the Master’s program for European Studies at the same university and at the LLM in Global Food Law program at the University of Parma. Additionally, he is a tutor and project supervisor for the Master’s program in Technology and Public Policy at the International Labour Organization’s Training Centre in Turin, Italy. His research interests focus on the intersection of technology and political science, particularly how Generative Intelligence influences the way users retrieve political information and how this, in turn, may inform their political decisions. Francesco has completed GPTZero’s course on Teaching Responsibly with AI. If you would like to reach out to Francesco, you can find him on his LinkedIn page.
Editor’s Note: moving forward, Francesco’s work on classroom games will be a monthly column!
It’s time for assessments in the Negotiation in the European Union course and this year, together with my colleague who coordinates the course, we decided to try a hybrid formula, so that the final grade will be informed equally by an assessment on theoretical knowledge and student participation in negotiation simulations.
Before conducting the simulation/evaluation, I spent several weeks training students in simulations in a safe environment. In one of these simulations, we used RepowerEU, the EU’s strategic plan for energy security, decarbonisation, and independence from Russian fossil fuels by 2030, as a case study.
The simulation was structured such that, after 15 minutes for context, I proposed a dilemma matrix: on one axis, national interest vs. European solidarity; on the other, short-term vs. long-term. Each group (corresponding to a country) had to position itself and negotiate a final position. For this purpose, I introduced six players in the field: Poland, Germany, Hungary, Denmark, Italy, and the Czech Republic, each with a unique energy mix, strengths/weaknesses, and political context.
The rules of the game:
• Each group had to apply at least one of the 12 RepowerEU measures.
• No agreement was mandatory, but creativity in finding win-win solutions was rewarded.
• I used facilitation techniques (active questioning, mediation) to break the deadlock in the groups and push them beyond seemingly insurmountable trade-offs.
The result was somehow unexpected. The Czech Republic, Italy, and Denmark reached an agreement on the green hydrogen corridor, even if the Czech Republic and Italy started from a position of short-term and national interest, while Denmark focused on the long term and European solidarity. Hungary, Germany, and Poland, on the other hand, remained isolated, unable to reach a consensus. Far from being a failure, this outcome offered me valuable insights. First, negotiation is contingent: the outcome depends on who is sitting at the table and how the constraints are interpreted. Second, the theory that what we teach does not necessarily result in the outputs that we would have expected.