This is the accepted version of the paper.This version of the publication may differ from the final published version. 2 Balancing competing policy demands: the case of sustainable public sector food procurement. Abstract A focus on market--based green growth strategies to pursue sustainability goals neglects the pursuit of understanding how human health is interwoven with the health of eco--systems to deliver sustainability goals. The article argues that clarifying the difference between green and sustainable public sector food procurement, with political continuity that supports and enables policymakers and practitioners to take an incremental approach to change, makes an important contribution to delivering more sustainable food systems and better public health nutrition. Five European case studies demonstrate the reality of devising and implementing innovative approaches to sustainable public sector food procurement and the effects of cultural and political framings. How legislation is enacted at the national level and interpreted at the local level is a key driver for sustainable procurement. Transition is dependent on political will and leadership and an infrastructure that can balance the economic, environmental and social drivers to effect change. The development of systems and indicators to measure change, reforms to EU directives on procurement, and the relationship between green growth strategies and sustainable diets are also discussed. The findings show the need to explore how consistent definitions for green public procurement and sustainable public procurement can be refined and standardized in order to support governments at all levels in reviewing and analysing their current food procurement strategies and practices to improve sustainability. Permanent repository linkKey words: Sustainable public procurement; green growth strategies; public health nutrition; sustainable diets; EU procurement regulation; urban and regional governments. IntroductionRecognising that food purchasing and catering services, including those in hospitals, care homes, schools, prisons and state companies etc., represent a significant part of public sector procurement budgets, the central premise of this article is that there is a need for clarity about what is meant by 'green' public sector food procurement and 'sustainable' public sector food procurement. The dominant economic paradigm has led to a growing focus on market--based green growth strategies to pursue sustainability goals and, it is argued, an ecological shift is required in order to further understanding of how human health is interwoven with the health of eco--systems, and to enable policymakers and practitioners to move towards creating more sustainable food systems and better public health nutrition.Public sector procurement, representing all of the goods and services purchased with public money, represents 13 to 20 per cent of gross domestic product (GDP) in OECD countries, including 17 percent of the EU's GDP (Evans et al, 2010), while in developing cou...
How to best assess potential health, environmental and other impacts of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and how to interpret the resulting evidence base have been long-standing controversial issues in the EU. As a response, transparency and inclusiveness became a major focus of regulatory science activities in the GMO impact area. Nevertheless, nearly three decades of controversies resulted in a heavily polarized policy environment, calling for further efforts. Against this backdrop the EU funded project GRACE explored the value of evidence synthesis approaches for GMO impact assessment and developed an evidence synthesis framework with a strong emphasis on openness, stakeholder engagement, transparency, and responsiveness to tackle regulatory science challenges. This framework was tested and implemented in the course of 14 systematic reviews or maps conducted on selected review questions spanning potential health, environmental, and socioeconomic impacts of GMOs. An inclusive development and prioritisation of review questions is of key importance in evidence synthesis as it helps to provide a better link between stakeholder demands and concerns and policy relevant outcomes. This paper, therefore, places a particular focus on the stakeholder involvement strategy developed and experiences gathered during this particular step in the course of the GRACE project. Based on this experience, possible lessons for future engagement exercises in highly controversial fields of regulatory science are discussed.
Lay participation in the deliberation of techno-scientific issues has become an important objective of policy making in many countries. Using the example of a series of Round Table discussions dealing with genome research allows us to analyse the ways in which the participants of this event construct their arguments during the discussion. Explaining the observed discursive strategies we focus on performative aspects of the deliberation process. In such a way it is taken into account how the setting of a given participatory process influences the ways in which participants are enrolled and enact their participation accordingly. In the analysed case, the setting was not taken as a given, but public participation and its discursive framework became itself subject to negotiation during the process. Hence, the discursive power of individual experiences and the legitimacy of personal interests as the argumentative basis were negotiated during the Round Table discussions. The participants only rarely grounded their statements in practical knowledge and individual experiences. Instead we saw them performing other discursive repertoires, e.g. drawing on societal benefits. Individual perspectives were often transcended and articulated in the form of superindividual arguments which endowed participants' statements with substantial discursive power and provided an alternative rationale for contributing to the deliberation without explicit reference to personal experiences. More broadly, the observed reluctance of the participants to speak-up for their personal interests can be seen as a result of a political culture that favours the advancement of de-individualised perspectives in public deliberation.
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