Sustainable Public Procurement: From Law to Practice

Abstract

This study aims to propose actions to improve the implementation of sustainable public procurement by identifying the problems perceived by public servants and social economy entities. Two types of questionnaires were sent to organizations in Spain and Europe and 217 complete answers were received (152 from the public sector and 65 from the social entities). In addition, 20 semi-structured personal interviews were conducted by phone with managers of social enterprises and four interviews, also by phone, were carried out with relevant people from the public sector. The results of the surveys and the interviews were structured using the analysis of the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats (SWOT), which was considered consistent with the strategic nature of public procurement. The perceived opportunities for the public sector focus on more efficient use of public resources and improvement of reputation and social equality. For the social entities, more participation in procurement could lead to less dependency on public funds and more visibility. The obstacles for the public sector are related to lack of training and internal resistance to change, as well as, in the case of social entities, to their small size and the tensions with their social object that might derive from bigger competition. The proposed activities focus on two objectives, more training to increase knowledge from the public sector and the readiness of social entities. It is concluded that it is necessary to establish channels of communications between the two groups to avoid possible inefficiencies.

A systematic review of barriers impeding the implementation of government green procurement

“…They were basing procurement decisions on price instead of whole-life costs for over 25 years. A recent study confirms that this tradition has not changed in Europe, as procurers were still associating lower price with best bid (Jiménez et al , 2019). Not just in Europe, China too faced similar resistance from its procurers.…”

“…Without the knowledge, procurers in Northern Ireland found it challenging to justify the procurement of often higher cost green products (Erridge and Hennigan, 2012). Government employees in Pakistan (Zaidi et al , 2018), Russia (Romodina and Silin, 2016), China (Zhu et al , 2013) and Europe (Jiménez et al , 2019) were found to be incompetent to implement GGP due to the lack of know-how. In Brazil, lack of know-how was the fourth top barrier identified among a list of 32 barriers (Da Costa and Da Motta, 2019).…”

Social Accounting for Sustainability: A Study in the Social Economy

“…The mentioned values that the social economy holds are deeply linked with human, sustainable, and social development [2][3][4][5][6][7]. The new Spanish Law 9/2017, from November 8, on Public Sector Procurement includes social and environmental criteria in the award [8,9]. Social economy entities have values and principles that correspond to social, environmental, and ethical criteria, which can be included in public procurement documents.…”

La Valoración de Empresas en la Economía Social. Valor Social Esperado del Museo de la Minería del País Vasco

“…: 0213-8093 Nº101/2021, pp. 33-56 de las ratios a partir del valor social integrado (San-Jose et al, 2020), los que analizan su componente ético (Zicari, 2020) o aquellos que lo aplican a la compra pública (Bernal et al, 2019;Mendoza et al, 2019). Sin embargo, previamente no ha sido trabajado en el ámbito de la valoración de empresas, pero sin duda, y, sobre todo, para las ENLs tiene gran utilidad por poderse utilizar con objeto de los planes estratégicos o poder hacer un balance de su situación, entre otros.…”