1. Drivers for sustainable public procurement

Early Stage Researcher Felippe Santos, SAPIENS Lead Researcher Rodrigo Lozano, and Lead Researcher Maria Barreiro-Gen recently published their open-access article entitled “Analysing the drivers for sustainable public procurement”. The article was published in the journal Environment Systems and Decisions.

The implementation of sustainable public procurement (SPP) has been carried out through several disciplinary approaches, including practical and research efforts based on organisational change management (OCM). Although there is a growing body of literature on OCM for SPP, most studies have focused on exploring drivers for and barriers to organisational change from a single context – for example, a single country or a single organisation. This article contributes to filling this research gap by analysing the drivers for changes towards SPP from two different world regions (Brazil and Sweden), offering a more complete understanding of organisational changes towards implementing SPP whilst providing a holistic approach to drivers for SPP.

This article’s key findings include:

– 46 drivers for implementing SPP were identified, categorised (into internal, connecting, and external), and ranked by importance;
– Collaboration between stakeholders plays a notable role in driving changes for SPP (the highest-ranked driver according to the empirical data);
– Drivers for SPP can be context-specific and organised in a continuum from praxis-driven to policy-driven, with common drivers in the middle;
– Moving towards sustainability in processes (e.g. SPP) is affected by the contexts, which must be considered when planning changes.

2. Article’s abstract 

Sustainable public procurement (SPP) is aimed at using government purchasing power to foster sustainable production and consumption and develop more sustainable business models. The implementation of SPP has been undertaken through several disciplinary approaches, including practical and research efforts based on organisational change management (OCM). Although there is a growing body of literature on OCM for SPP, research on this topic is still limited and mostly focused on a single-country context. This paper aims to fill this research gap by analysing the drivers for changes towards SPP from two different world regions. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with twelve Brazilian and ten Swedish SPP professionals. The interviews were analysed using Grounded Theory’s constant comparative method. From the interviews, 46 drivers were collated, then ranked in order of importance, and categorised according to their level (external, connecting, and internal). From the interviews, twenty-two new drivers were identified. The findings show that drivers for SPP are context-specific and can be organised in a continuum of change approaches between praxis-driven and policy-driven. This study highlights the contextual influence on drivers for the SPP process. A holistic approach is needed for changes towards SPP, considering internal, connecting, and external drivers in the spectrum from praxis to policy.

Drivers for sustainable public procurement in a continuum from praxis-driven to policy-driven