Sustainable Public Procurement

Public procurement wields enormous purchasing power: it represents an average of 12% of GDP in OECD countries and 14.5% in low-income countries, and offers a valuable opportunity to gear public expenditures towards green growth and contribute to the achievement of sustainability goals. Currently, public procurement – which is generally guided by the principles of fairness, transparency, openness, and non-discrimination – is evolving into a strategic instrument aimed at fostering sustainable development and contributing to market transformation .It can therefore play a critical role in promoting the inclusive and sustainable economic growth upheld by the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and contribute to SDG 12.

The number of countries implementing Sustainable Public Procurement policies and action plans is measured by assessing the level of implementation of sustainable public procurement (SPP) in countries (whose national or federal government submitted a report on their SPP activities) through the appraisal of 6 different parameters:

• Existence of a SPP policy or action plan; 
• whether the Public procurement legal framework is conducive to SPP implementation; 
• what are the means undertaken to support public procurement practitioners’ practice of SPP, 
• whether specific criteria have been developed to support SPP, 
• whether SPP is monitored, and 
• whether data on SPP implementation is collected.

The appraisal of reports and relevant evidence submitted by national or federal governments then allow for the classification of those countries into 4 different levels of SPP implementation through the following maturity model: 

• Low-level implementation
• Lower-intermediate implementation
• Upper-intermediate implementation
• Advanced implementation