Sustainable Procurement in Australian and UK Universities

Abstract

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

“…Keulemans and Van de Walle's () study of European‐wide public views on state procurement provides evidence of growing support for environmental and social sustainability. Environmental sustainability has been shown to be dominant and more smoothly incorporated into state procurement, in part because moves towards renewable energy and waste and carbon footprint reduction dovetail more explicitly with cost‐reduction strategies and also because there is a clear alignment with addressing wider global sustainability challenges (Nijaki & Worrel, ; Young et al., ). Social responsibility has been more commonly associated with strengthening supply links to domestic producers (Keulemans & Van de Walle, ; Nijaki & Worrel, ), including initiatives for the local provisioning of school and hospital meals (Morgan & Sonnino, ).…”

Green Public Procurement in the Academic Literature

“…They adopt a general topic, specific to a country, or a particular theme for one industry. Several studies are comparing green procurement issues, either on countries in the public sector (Young et al, 2016;Nissinen et al, 2009;Walker and Brammer, 2012), or in public and private organizational contexts (Leal Filho et al, 2019;Mashele and Chuchu, 2018;McMurray et al, 2014).…”

“…The examined articles can be grouped into several categories according to the analyzed domain/industry, as follows: construction industry (Varnäs et al, 2009;Testa et al, 2016b; Pacheco-Blanco and Bastante-Ceca, 2016 ), health (Oruezabala and Rico, 2012), education (Young et al, 2016;Leal Filho et al, 2019), organic food (Smith et al, 2016), public transport (Aldenius and Khan, 2017), cleaning services (Lundberg et al, 2015), municipalities (Testa et al, 2016a), etc. Most of the articles (46.96%) address the GPP in general, within one or more countries.…”

“…The contracting authorities must award a contract based on the most economically advantageous offer (by applying the criteria: price, cost, quality-price ratio, quality-cost ratio). Testa et al (2016b) point out that the decision-makers need to be more involved in establishing a clear definition of the green offers and in creating "standard tools for monitoring the GPP," but the price dominance in the award of the procurement contracts is still observed in the studies (Luttenberger and Luttenberger, 2016;Young et al, 2016). Luttenberger and Luttenberger (2016) recommend the use of environmental life cycle cost analysis, including externalities, although their calculation raises problems.…”

‘Double-taxing’ Indigenous business: exploring the effects of political discourse on the transfer of public procurement policy

“…Public procurement policies have focused on achieving social outcomes such as addressing employment, social exclusion, and economic development of small and minority owned firms (Erridge and McIlroy 2002;Erridge 2007;McCrudden 2004McCrudden , 2007. Public procurement is a seen as a tool for policymakers to increase prosperity and enhance social and economic well-being (Torvinen and Haukipuro 2018), and is often called social procurement (Barraket, Keast, and Furneaux 2016;Furneaux and Barraket 2014;Loosemore 2016) or sustainable procurement (Preuss 2009;Walker and Brammer 2009;Young, Nagpal, and Adams 2016). 1 Specifically, public procurement for policy outcomes has focused on implementing mechanisms that: (i) enforce antidiscrimination laws, (ii) promote affirmative action in employment, and (iii) stimulate entrepreneurial activity by marginalized groups (McCrudden 2004).…”