Procuring Sustainability – How the Public Sector Can Deliver on its Greening Potential

Abstract:The public sector can support the transition to a low-carbon, biodiverse circular economy by using its substantial purchasing power to buy goods, services, and works with a lower environmental impact. However, so far environmental considerations have been integrated into public procurement only to a limited degree. The slow progress comes as no surprise, because designing procurement practices that take environmental considerations into account is a demanding process. The potential of different policy instruments to effectively influence sustainability also varies considerably by sector, as our analysis on the procurement of food, mobility and electricity illustrates. To address the situation, we propose decision-makers to define dynamic lists of product groups that are environmentally significant in procurement, on the one hand, and to develop context-specific mixes of legal instruments to govern such product groups, on the other. At the core of such policy mixes are procurement laws, which subject the procurement process to sustainability considerations in multiple phases. Moreover, we illustrate in the article that the environmental impacts of procurement can be addressed through a wide range of other law and policy instruments as well. We propose a typology of four groups of instruments for greening procurement, and detect within them internationally a tendency towards the group of mandatory, product or sector specific environmental requirements. Finally, our article argues that the developments in procurement law indicate increasing fluidity in the classic demarcation between environmental law and economic law. Besides the empirical importance of procurement law for sustainability, it thus seems to have relevance for the systemization of law in broader terms.

Publication year:2022

Accessibility:Open

Review status:Peer-reviewed