A systems approach for green public procurement implementation

Abstract

Purpose This paper aims to identify important factors in green public procurement (GPP) implementation and then to clarify how these factors affect GPP implementation. Design/methodology/approach The authors applied the Delphi method first and then conducted a focused and constrained multiple case study at 18 government procurement centers across China. Findings The authors identified four clusters of factors for successful GPP implementation: more clear, consistent and operational policy goals; a nation-wide green procurement campaign to enhance social capital and cultural resources; promoting staff’s ethics, professionalism, capacity and knowledge; and establishing checks and balances among organizations involved in the whole purchasing process. Social implications GPP can significantly improve environmental protection and sustainable development. Originality/value Based on key insights from systems theory and agency theory, the authors emphasize that GPP implementation must take down its own functional silos and adopt a process approach across organizational tiers to synchronize human resource based and inter-organizational capabilities into a unified whole through information sharing, communications and collaboration.

How external stakeholders drive the green public procurement practice? An organizational learning perspective

“…However, with the background that the regulations are voluntary (European Commission, 2016;Testa et al, 2012) and a priority (Ministry of Finance, 2017; Standing Committee of the National People's Congress, 2014), the legislation of the central government does not have much coercive effect on GPP practice. Especially in China, the relevant laws and regulations of GPP are scattered and general (Liu et al, 2019a), which makes promoting the implementation of GPP by local public sectors mainly the work of local governments (Wang et al, 2020a). In fact, local public sectors mainly deal with local governments.…”

Stewardship and administrative capacity in green public procurement in the Czech Republic: evidence from a large-N survey

“…One of the crucial obstacles on the way to high GPP performance is the lack of the adequate resource base of municipalities [57]. Wang et al [75], p. 292, explain that the key types of the required resources are material, information, and social capital, no less important are ethics and professionalism of the individual public procurers, as well as the availability of the sufficient working capacity (ibid).…”

“…In view of the importance of resource provisioning, Rosell [57] hypothesizes that richer countries are more likely to exhibit superior GPP performance, interestingly, within these countries, better GPP performance was observed within larger and richer municipalities [37,41]. One option of fulfilling the considerable resource requirements of high GPP performance is promoting the collaboration of stakeholders, such as policy-makers, users, buyers, vendors [75], p. 292). While stakeholders may exert pressure on local authorities to engage in GPP, they may also supply some of the resources needed by local authorities for this purpose [32,57].…”

Municipal Green Purchasing in Mexico: Policy Adoption and Implementation Success

“…Most of the extant research on GPP has been conducted in developed countries such as Sweden, United Kingdom, Spain, The Netherlands, USA, Australia, Norway, Denmark, Germany, and Canada [15]. In terms of developing countries, apart from Latin America, there are studies in Africa [34], Ghana [35], India [36], Pakistan [37], South Africa [38], and Thailand [39]; however, most of them have been performed in China [40][41][42][43][44][45][46][47] and Nigeria [48][49][50].…”

“…First, key actors include government regulatory entities, procurement and environmental professionals, politicians, firms, the media, and civil society organizations [49]. Second, key drivers of GPP include personnel skills, green consciousness, clarity and specificity of policies, and environmentally friendly products/vendors information [45]. Third, the barriers to adoption of GPP can be grouped by institutional aspects (including culture, the lack of a relevant legal framework, lack of political will, lack of training and employee competences, stakeholder pressures, and the lack of long-term planning), issues related to the improvement of informational mechanisms (poor monitoring and inspection systems, inadequate policy measures, limited knowledge about the social and environmental impacts), the ability to make decisions in public managers (limited capacity of stakeholders, budget constraints, and lack of top management support), and market conditions and perceptions (unavailability of green products, the relative higher costs/prices of the sustainable options, the perception that sustainable items can restrict competition) [15,35,37,48,52,53].…”