Public sector procurement and ethical trade: Governance and social responsibility in some hidden global supply chains

Abstract

This paper places a critical spotlight on the ways in which governance and social responsibility concerning labour standards work in the context of public sector procurement. Supply chains provisioning the public sector, incorporating a vast array of materials used in public services such as education, health, social housing and transportation, have been under‐researched and under‐theorised in the geographical and wider social science literature on Global Production Networks, Global Value Chains and consumption ethics. Against this backdrop, the paper evaluates the emergence of ethical trading programmes involving labour standards in UK public sector sourcing, drawing on examples from the health, higher education, construction and transportation sectors and a methodology combining interviews with participant observation. Findings show that ethical public procurement is shaped, and often constrained, by: the relatively low profile of many materials used in public services, which challenge effective campaigning and advocacy work; the consequent limits to reputational risk for state departments and first‐tier suppliers if labour issues are encountered in their supply chains; and the significant role of EU and UK procurement law, which until 2014 rendered social responsibility in public sector sourcing a legal risk to specify. Through a practice‐orientated approach and adopting the notion of responsibilisation inspired by governmentality perspectives, the paper grasps how these challenges for ethical public procurement are encountered and negotiated by procurement managers and those influencing them in a neoliberal environment. It is shown that ethical sourcing is significantly less advanced in the UK public sector than it is in consumer goods sectors, with implications for social justice in a whole realm of under‐researched global supply chains.

State policies and upgrading in global value chains: A systematic literature review

“…Furthermore, in a significant number of cases analyzed, the state's buyer role was aimed at achieving improved environmental performance at a local level (Table 2). Such evidence is in line with the increased emphasis on (social and environmental) responsibility that governments, especially in developed countries, are placing on their purchasing activities (see Hughes et al, 2019).…”

“…Our review also found that few studies examined the state's role as buyer in relation to GVC-oriented policies, perhaps due to the fact that public sector procurement is a new and emerging focus of GVCs/ GPNs research (Hughes et al, 2019). The few examples observed were primarily in the context of complex product GVCs located in upper-middle or high-income economies (Table 3).…”

Global value chains, import orientation, and the state: South Africa’s pharmaceutical industry

“…The role of the state as a producer through state-owned companies, although a greater emphasis in international business research (e.g., Cuervo-Cazurra, Inkpen, Musacchio, & Ramaswamy, 2014 ), has still to receive considerable attention in relation to GVCs. Nevertheless, emerging research has focused on the state buyer role in terms of public procurement (Hughes, Morrison, & Ruwanpura, 2019 ). More broadly, growing attention has been placed on the active ways states are shaping their engagement with global trade (Evenett, 2019 ), including through industrial policy (Hauge, 2020 ; Kaplinsky & Morris, 2015 ; Whitfield, Staritz, & Morris, 2020 ).…”

Geographies of production II: Thinking through the state

“…Procurement remains a crucial if underappreciated modality of state action that shapes global production networks in largely unexplored ways. Hughes, Morrison and Ruwanpura (2019) study the introduction of ethical codes for supply chains into government procurement policies in a variety of sectors in the UK, efforts that are hampered by the legal context and absence of consumer pressure (see also Martin-Ortega, 2018). The state-as-buyer role is more often used to shore up domestic producers, for example, in food procurement for hospitals, schools, and food aid programs.…”