Social License
Social License is a seven-round, dual-perspective simulation built around the Kamalapur Cement Project — a greenfield industrial development that displaces five villages and 4,000 people. Participants first play the Project Manager across five rounds, making high-stakes decisions on land acquisition, community engagement, and environmental risk under real deadline and cost pressure, tracked across four live scores — Timeline, Community Trust, Legitimacy, and Corporate Standing. At the midpoint, a mandatory role-switch places participants inside the community itself, as Mohit Verma, a farmer whose land, family, and future were shaped entirely by the choices made in the first half of the simulation.
This structural mirror is what distinguishes Social License from conventional stakeholder-engagement case teaching: the consequences of Round 1 are not summarised in a debrief — they are lived, three rounds later, from the other side of the table. Grounded in India's actual legal architecture for land acquisition and consent — FPIC, PESA 1996, and LARR 2013 — the simulation shows participants that procedural compliance and genuine consent are not the same thing, and that a social license, once lost, is far harder to rebuild than it was to earn.
- Consent vs. compliance
- Irreversibility of early decisions
- Applying FPIC, PESA, LARR
- Cross-power perspective-taking
- Short-term vs. long-run viability
- Dual-role architecture — participants play both the Project Manager (Rounds 1–5) and an affected community member, Mohit Verma (Rounds 6–7), experiencing the same decisions from opposite ends of power
- Branch-specific narrative engine — every round's "Combined Brief" is dynamically rendered based on the participant's full decision path, not a single prior choice
- Three world-state outcomes — Partnership, Contested, or Adversarial — determined by cumulative Trust and Legitimacy scores, never labelled to the player but discovered through lived narrative consequence
- Weighted Social License Score with facilitator-adjustable component weights (Trust, Legitimacy, Timeline, Corporate Standing, Quiz Score) and mandatory written rationale at every decision
- Open-text policy capstone and personalised player debrief, alongside a facilitator analytics dashboard with full decision-path, rationale, and Excel export
- Ability to distinguish procedural compliance from genuine, legally-grounded community consent
- Recognition that early-stage decisions compound irreversibly, foreclosing options that seemed reversible at the time
- Capability to apply real stakeholder-engagement frameworks — FPIC, PESA, LARR 2013 — to live project decisions
- Skill in perspective-taking across power asymmetries — from the manager holding the pen to the villager holding nothing
- Internalisation that short-term performance metrics and long-run project viability are frequently in direct conflict, and that optimising for one often destroys the other
