How can Public Procurement be a strategic tool in supporting countries across the globe to achieve their environmental and socio-economic goals? SAPIENS NETWORK Lead Researcher Prof. Gustavo Piga (Professor of Economics, University of Rome Tor Vergata) together with a team of World Bank consultants and global experts discuss and illustrate how in a recently published study entitled “Global Procurement Partnership for Sustainable Development- A stocktaking review of developments on Public Procurement”.

The report, launched at the end of January 2022, is a synthesis of an extensive review aiming at outlining critical global challenges and opportunities in moving toward modern procurement systems around the world and making the case for a Global Procurement Partnership (GPP) for strengthening development effectiveness through better understanding and implementation of procurement reforms.

Accounting for around 15 percent of global gross domestic product in 2019 – the study says that public procurement spending is expected to increase in the coming years because the ongoing global COVID-19 pandemic has generated overwhelming demand for massive stimulus packages in both developed and developing economies. Moreover, public purchasing can support countries in achieving multiple objectives and more importantly “values”, such as effectiveness, equity, and accountability.

To unleash Public Procurement potential to become a strategic tool able to generate for countries “social value”, which goes beyond the mere economic considerations for cost reduction and efficiency of spending, the report argues that several changes are needed.

First, public procurement shall be looked at not only as a transactional business process of public organizations. Therefore, its performance shall not be measured only in terms of efficiency, but rather on how well procurement transactions can achieve the goals of public procurement, including how well the regulatory system succeeds at safeguarding national policy goals such as protecting the environment and social and labor rights.

Secondly, to favor the production of “social value” public purchasing costs shall be accounted for by taking a longer-term perspective that is able to look beyond the immediate gains in terms of savings. To this end, the modernization of public procurement processes, via the introduction of digital technologies and innovation can help countries across the globe in reducing transactional costs and be used to favor governance, social, and environmental impacts.

 

 

Finally, change requires building capacities to change and embed them in the public sector. The report therefore argues for the need to build a broad international coalition—involving governments as well as private businesses— and form a global partnership alliance that could contribute to procurement efficiency while delivering better services to people all over the world.

The global partnership will be established first through a participatory design process to determine interest in and commitment to the proposal, gauge views, receive feedback, define core objectives, and develop a broad action plan. Its ultimate is to widen and deepen networks, learning, outreach, and support for better-coordinated, better-resourced, and better-targeted development assistance in public procurement.