The “baby steps” in mainstreaming sustainable public procurement in Ghana: A “double‐agency” perspective

Abstract

The emerging literature on public procurement policy suggests that public procurement may be leveraged to advance several public policy agenda. Hence, many countries have reformed their public procurement process towards social and environmental outcomes termed sustainable public procurement. These reforms have often been launched in response to international initiatives such as the global 10-year framework for action on sustainable consumption and production by the Johannesburg implementation plan in 2002 and the Sustainable Development Goals.Yet, empirical evidence on the drivers and benefits of SPP in developing countries is still scarce. This gap is addressed with a qualitative case study of six public sector institutions in Ghana. On the basis of elite interviews, this paper highlights barriers to mainstreaming SPP in Ghana's public sector. We further advance the scanty principal-agency literature by establishing a double-agency relationship in the context of SPP, which depicts limited agency cases where principals lack the capacity to defend their own interests.

Sustainable Public Procurement and Human Rights: Barriers to Deliver on Socially Sustainable Road Infrastructure Projects in Mexico

“…Often, particularly in developing countries such as Malaysia, Ghana and Nigeria, legal sustainable frameworks on sustainable procurement are not fulfilled. Lack of enforcement has proved to be a common cause of unsustainable infrastructure outcomes [41][42][43].…”

“…Political opposition to sustainability from high-rank decision makers is a strong barrier of socially sustainable infrastructure [32,[43][44][45]. Indeed, political influence and support facilitated sustainable infrastructure in China and the United Kingdom, whereas in Ghana, Europe, Brazil, Malaysia, United States and Canada, these elements hindered it [28,29,46,47].…”

“…Indeed, political influence and support facilitated sustainable infrastructure in China and the United Kingdom, whereas in Ghana, Europe, Brazil, Malaysia, United States and Canada, these elements hindered it [28,29,46,47]. Individual leadership is a great enabler of sustainability in public procurement, but also a driver to shift unsustainable procurement patterns of an organization's culture [28,43,48]. If senior managers embrace sustainability and embed it into planning and strategies, their team will implement sustainable procurement, too [28].…”

Municipal Green Purchasing in Mexico: Policy Adoption and Implementation Success

“…Most of the extant research on GPP has been conducted in developed countries such as Sweden, United Kingdom, Spain, The Netherlands, USA, Australia, Norway, Denmark, Germany, and Canada [15]. In terms of developing countries, apart from Latin America, there are studies in Africa [34], Ghana [35], India [36], Pakistan [37], South Africa [38], and Thailand [39]; however, most of them have been performed in China [40][41][42][43][44][45][46][47] and Nigeria [48][49][50].…”

“…Second, key drivers of GPP include personnel skills, green consciousness, clarity and specificity of policies, and environmentally friendly products/vendors information [45]. Third, the barriers to adoption of GPP can be grouped by institutional aspects (including culture, the lack of a relevant legal framework, lack of political will, lack of training and employee competences, stakeholder pressures, and the lack of long-term planning), issues related to the improvement of informational mechanisms (poor monitoring and inspection systems, inadequate policy measures, limited knowledge about the social and environmental impacts), the ability to make decisions in public managers (limited capacity of stakeholders, budget constraints, and lack of top management support), and market conditions and perceptions (unavailability of green products, the relative higher costs/prices of the sustainable options, the perception that sustainable items can restrict competition) [15,35,37,48,52,53].…”