Sustainable public procurement: a classic case of Catch 22 - Prof. dr ir H.R. Krikke - Q3 2011
Despite our free market system, it is popular belief that the government should take the lead in solving complicated societal issues – in particular in times of trouble like we have at the moment. One of these issues is sustainability.
EU authorities can make an important contribution to sustainable consumption and production – what they call Green Public Procurement. Typically public tendering criteria can be classified as exclusion, selection or awarding and each tender distinguishes between these criteria according to EU regulation. Exclusion would prohibit non-sustainable suppliers to participate in the tender and selection criteria would prefer sustainable vendors whilst awarding criteria considers sustainability as a bonus that might favour sustainable partners (but not necessarily). Unfortunately, the latter is often current practice. Green Public Procurement is a voluntary instrument, and its effects fail to materialize. Instead we find a lot of window dressing. Official Dutch policy mandates that procurement of public institutions should be done 100% sustainable. Not only is this a ‘de facto’ impossibility, current practice is far from sustainable. The green procurement guidelines as designed by AgentschapNL are purely procedural and have no real effect.
Now the question is: how come? First I think it has to do with perverse incentives. There appear to be no mechanisms that encourage green procurement, and most public purchasing managers have a very strong, short term cost focus. The Open University is conducting research on how to define the right balanced set of KPIs based on triple P and how to implement them. Second, there appears to be a lack of knowledge, at least that is what we conclude from our conversations with public authorities. We advocate more education based on the latest scientific insights. Payback times are about one year, presuming knowledge obtained is actually applied in practice. However, here comes the third –and most worrying- barrier. Similar to consumers and industry there is a general attitude “not to stick your neck out”. Professor Roos Vonk describes this phenomenon as multiple ignorance (meervoudige onwetendheid): “nobody acts so it can’t that bad”. This behaviour we find e.g. with accidents (a crowd is watching but no one helps injured victims), but also in buying eco-friendly products. I am convinced that this is a major factor that prevents green public procurement from becoming common practice. The only way to break this vicious circle is to create critical mass. But to create critical mass it must become common practice. A classic case of Catch 22!
