Because every procurement should be sustainable.
“The scale and dependability of governments’ collective procurement spending makes it one of the most powerful policy instruments for stimulating innovation to address the climate crisis.”
Tanya Filer, Digital State Policy & Research Lead, Bennett Institute for Public Policy at the University of Cambridge
Our governments will need to buy things in a fundamentally different way if we want to tackle the climate crisis. Sustainability needs to be at the heart of every government purchase if we want to have greener, cleaner, and more resilient supply chains.
For us, Sustainable Public Procurement (SPP) is about how organizations buy goods and services across the three pillars of sustainable development: economic, social, and environmental benefits. Our approach adds open government and open data strategies to improve adoption and impact, such as involving stakeholders in planning and delivering better purchasing, and using public data to unlock, share, and analyze contracts and their outcomes.
Done better and openly, public procurement presents a huge opportunity to fight climate change. Done poorly or left unchanged, procurement will be a brake on environmental and social progress and leave the most vulnerable communities behind.
Open contracting can help to make public procurement more sustainable by
- Sustainable public procurement strategies that promote a net-zero emissions economy through systemic reforms
- Stimulating innovation for sustainable public services and infrastructure
- Building climate-resilient communities
Improving climate resilience
Read how open contracting strategies are improving climate resilience in flood-prone Assam, India.
Buying Greener Technology in the UK
Get practical tools for adopting environmentally responsible practices in hardware and software procurement.
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Here’s how open contracting can help make public procurement more sustainable, across three areas of work.
How to get started on sustainable public procurement
There are so many ways to buy more sustainably—from selecting ecolabels, to product lifecycle costing, to measuring carbon emissions, to sourcing more locally. Our new toolkit can help you get started, particularly in low tech environments.
We spoke to 30 procurement practitioners across dozens of countries to identify gaps in sustainable strategies and support, leading to our new Open and Sustainable Public Procurement toolkit. Structured across the whole cycle of planning and delivering public contracts, the toolkit helps you frame a strategy, adopt best practices, and collect the best indicators to measure progress. It is full of practical examples, checklists, and indicators, co-designed with PUBLIC, and Spend Network, and supported by Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH.
Quick ’n’ easy
Our short video provides a quick introduction into the key concepts to implement open sustainable public procurement.
More resources
From policy briefs, guidance on data modeling and a full video introduction, we have more resources to help you implement open and sustainable public procurement.
Our Policy Brief Open, Sustainable Government Procurement. For People, Planet and Prosperity provides a quick overview of the key arguments for open and sustainable public procurement.
This guide provides more detail on what data is needed to calculate SPP indicators and how to disclose that data using the Open Contracting Data Standard (OCDS)
Our work
As we continue to create user-friendly resources and open data tools for practitioners, we are also helping our partners develop new policies from the ground up and implement and track existing policies around sustainable procurement.
Our work is also expanding into new areas of climate action. In Europe, we are exploring how existing procurement data can help governments measure the real environmental impact of green purchasing. We are also applying our experience in public spending and digital systems to climate finance, exploring how better data can connect climate commitments with budgets, procurement and delivery on the ground.
Public procurement across the European Union flows through ambitious new data platforms, but the data still cannot tell us whether green procurement is reducing emissions. Analysis from OCP and IISD demonstrates that it can be done, using data that governments are already collecting.
Together with the Public Procurement Office in Lithuania, we are showcasing how open data can be used to promote and track sustainable purchasing. Lithuania created a scoreboard for public authorities that tracks technical specifications, award criteria and clauses, providing detailed data on green procurement uptake. In 2022, green procurement accounted for 53% by value and 30% of procedures.
Through our Green Flags work, we are documenting how open data can throw light on sustainable procurement performance and measurement, including for carbon emissions. It is based on research focused on the Netherlands, Lithuania and Paraguay, and on interviews with global practitioners working to define, qualify, operationalize, and measure green public procurement (GPP) in terms of size/scale of purchasing as well as performance.
In Mexico City, where 100 million passengers use public transportation each month, we’re helping expand green transportation solutions to underserved neighborhoods while cutting nearly 6,000 tons of CO2 in the next decade. Through Lift, we supported their cross-departmental team to design a transparent and inclusive process to engage vendors and solicit user feedback. The results are impressive: the service is scheduled to expand from 6,500 to 9,300 bikes and from 480 to 687 bike stations at half the cost.
Through our Lift program, we worked with CivicDataLab to use data and open contracting to support more resilient infrastructure for flood-affected communities in Assam. The approach has since informed further disaster-resilience work in India.
Taiwan is full of typhoons, and increasingly, heavy torrential rains. In the last decade, there has been an average of eight critical floods per year. A team of computer engineers, data scientists, civil engineering researchers, and journalists worked together to develop data-driven approach to evaluating water resource management building on government procurement data, project information, and geolocational information for floods.
Procurement can’t be sustainable unless it is inclusive. See what we are also doing to improve equity and inclusion, especially for small business, women and marginalized communities in public contracting. Past Lift projects in El Paso, Des Moines and Lille also explored how cities could embed social equity and sustainability into procurement, including through new green purchasing policies.
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