The role of public procurement in Brazil’s sustainable development
In Brazil, OCP works together with Transparência Brasil to support the Ministry of Management and Innovation in Public Services in strengthening the monitoring of its National Strategy for Public Procurement for Sustainable Development. This includes proposing new social and environmental indicators and developing a taxonomy to monitor the national school feeding program.
The government is not just any consumer in Brazil. It is the country’s largest buyer. Depending on how you measure it, its purchases represent 12% to 16% of GDP. In 2021, public buyers purchased about 20% of all the construction industry’s economic output and 15% of pharmaceutical products manufactured in the country, excluding state-owned enterprises. When a buyer of this size decides what to buy, from whom, and on what criteria, it sends a powerful signal to the entire economy.
For a long time, public procurement was considered a purely administrative function, guided by the logic of “lowest price at any cost.” However, this began to change with the new Law on Bidding and Contracts, which incorporated “sustainable national development” as a principle (Art. 5) and as an objective (Art. 11, IV) of bidding processes, and established preference margins for domestic products and for recycled, recyclable, or biodegradable goods (Art. 26).
With this change, buying well no longer meant simply buying cheaply: it now means buying in a way that creates value for society. Based on this, the Federal Government created the Interministerial Commission for Public Procurement for Sustainable Development (CICS) in 2024; and established the National Strategy for Public Procurement for Sustainable Development (ENCP) in 2025, organized around the economic, social, environmental, and management pillars. And in 2026, it created the Directorate of Strategies in Public Procurement for Sustainable Development (DECS), with a team dedicated to this agenda.
Why is this so important? Because the country needs transformations such as an ecological transition, sustainable reindustrialization, and domestic production of healthcare supplies, which the market alone cannot lead. These are high-risk projects with long timeframes and uncertain returns.
When the government announces it will buy domestically manufactured buses and trains, clean technologies, or locally produced medicines, it creates a market where before there was uncertainty. Countries that have made the most progress on these agendas have known this for decades, from the Buy American Act of 1933 to DARPA, the U.S. Department of Defense agency that commissions technologies not yet available on the market and was instrumental in developing the internet. And we still have plenty of room to grow: in Brazil, more than 80% of federal support for innovation is allocated to supply-side instruments and less than 20% to demand-side instruments, such as public procurement.
The role of public procurement, then, is to use the State’s enormous purchasing power to steer the economy smartly: generating employment, including for small businesses, stimulating innovation, and accelerating the ecological transformation. It’s a paradigm shift, and Brazil is already moving in that direction.
Open data for successful sustainability
A national public procurement strategy needs data at two key moments: during formulation, so its guidelines are based on a realistic assessment and point the way forward; and during monitoring, to determine whether actions are producing the desired impact or whether course correction is needed. Without data, a strategy risks remaining merely theoretical or allocating public resources to the wrong place without anyone noticing.
It is no coincidence that the national strategy includes a specific objective for data-driven decision-making, and that the decree creating the DECS (Directorate of Economic and Social Sciences) assigned it the responsibility of “promoting the creation and coordinating a public procurement observatory” (Art. 25, IV). Thus, the Public Procurement Observatory was born. Its function is not to publish tenders or contracts, a task already performed by the National Public Procurement Portal (PNCP), but to transform data into information, indicators, studies, and reports that show whether the government’s purchasing power is generating the expected results.
The challenge is significant: nearly 200 procurement systems record information differently and must be cleaned, standardized, and cross-referenced with other sources, such as invoices, company records, and employment data. With well-processed data, we can calculate the indicators for the national strategy and even simulate scenarios: What happens to employment, income, and emissions in each region if we widen a preference margin? That is what MIRA, a regionalized impact model developed by the DECS, seeks to answer.
And here is what makes us most optimistic: this data must be open. When everyone can access the data, methodologies, and code for each indicator, universities can test hypotheses, civil society organizations can monitor policies, businesses can identify opportunities, and public managers can make decisions with greater confidence.
The Observatory adopts the principles of open science: in partnership with the Advanced Laboratory for Production, Research, and Innovation in Software (LAPPIS) at the University of Brasília, we are building a platform where the data journey, from source to indicator, is documented, reproducible, and based on open-source tools.
In short, open data allows a sustainability strategy to learn from its own experience. With the Observatory, Brazil is taking an important step toward using the State’s purchasing power more transparently and intelligently, moving toward truly sustainable and inclusive development.
*Coordinator of the Interministerial Commission on Public Procurement for Sustainable and Responsible Development, Ministry of Management and Innovation in Public Services of Brazil.
