Implementation of sustainable public procurement practices and policies: A sorting framework

Abstract

In general, there are many disincentives standing in the way of promoting change in public procurement practices by government agencies. Because engaging in sustainable purchasing requires some level of entrepreneurialism and risk-taking, a sorting framework is adopted to gauge whether some organizations are systematically more likely to pursue sustainable public purchasing (SPP) efforts than others. One-way analysis of variance and other methods are applied to a survey of public procurement practitioners across over 300 governments in the U.S. Results strongly suggest that agencies of various scope and reach tend to abstain from aggressively pursuing SPP efforts. However, when they do employ SPP, these efforts tend to be quite variable across and within levels of government and organizational size. In an effort to bridge theory with empirical data, a strong case can be made that the current state of SPP in the United States is the result of random and very cautious experimentation with little systematic pattern to SPP adoption.

More Than a Nudge? Arguments and Tools for Mandating Green Public Procurement in the EU

“…At present, the GPP has been most commonly implemented at the stage of tender specifications and inserted in the award criteria of the tender processes, and has been often criticised due to insufficiently well-defined criteria [60]. This attests to the documented lack of expertise on the matter of public procurement [61] that has been noted in the scholarship. What is more, the modest use of GPP across Europe can further be attributed also to the risk-averse nature of public procurement officials, especially in light of the complex EU legal framework on the matter that also applies, by virtue of national transposition of directives, to purchases below the EU thresholds, in public procurement at the local and regional level [62].…”

“…There are many awareness-raising [77], toolkit development [78], and capacity-building activities [77] across the EU that seem to be overridden by de jure and de facto barriers to GPP. Some of these are the legal risk such procurement entails in the eyes of risk-averse and less entrepreneurial public procurement organisations and their practitioners [61,79], the lack of knowledge [80], and the lack of political and practical guidance on the matter for public officials [80] (pp.319-320). Furthermore, the often single-year budgeting of public expenditure discriminates against products with lower life-cycle costs but higher upfront costs [61] (p.9), as it inhibits officers from accounting for life-cycle savings of products or services purchased under the MEAT method.…”

“…Such a broad array of possibilities for public authorities to determine the characteristics of the sought sustainable purchase should facilitate the inclusion of such requirements in public purchasing processes, especially where supported by practical examples [15] (pp. [57][58][59][60][61][62]). Yet, public authorities have not used them as a common practice across the EU [81] (pp.319-320), [84], [103] (p.9).…”

Evaluating Sustainable Purchasing Processes in the Hotel Industry

“…The literature related to different models or theoretical frameworks on SP implementation processes has been reviewed [3,7,23,25,[27][28][29]66,67,[69][70][71][72][74][75][76][77][78][79][80][81][82][83][84][85][86]. A summary of the findings is presented in Table 1, with details about (1) scope (P for purchasing function, SCM for supply chain management); (2) whether it is a real implementation model, with all stages clearly identified and described; (3) whether it identifies factors (drivers and barriers) for implementation; (4) whether it is just focused on one stage (e.g., supplier assessment or implementation of code of conduct); (5) whether it is a decision tool; and (6) whether it refers to a specific sector (S) or a geographic area (G).…”

“…Most of the frameworks or models discussed above make good proposals regarding the factors that most influence adequate SP implementation, identifying the drivers that favour its implementation as well as the obstacles or barriers that make it difficult [3,7,10,23,25,[27][28][29]46,66,67,[69][70][71][72]74,[76][77][78][79][80][81][82][83]85,86]. Drivers are classified as internal factors (within the buying company) or external factors (outside the buying company).…”