Sustainable Public Procurement: The Next Global Revolution?
On the 28th of March 2023 the Public Procurement Research Group (PPRG) at the University of Nottingham (UK) organised its annual lecture on Sustainable Public Procurement: The Next Global Revolution? with Professor Steven L. Schooner, Nash and Cibinic Professor of Government Procurement Law at the George Washington University School of Law. The George Washington University, in Washington DC, USA, is a partner organisation of the SAPIENS Network.
Professor Schooner commenced the lecture by introducing the dangers of climate change, its peculiarities and the differences between climate change adaptation and mitigation. He mentioned that adaptation can be understood as the process of adjusting to the current and future effects of climate change while mitigation presupposes making the impacts of climate change less severe by preventing or reducing the emission of greenhouse gases (GHG) into the atmosphere.
In the context of public procurement’s (PP) power to tackle sustainability challenges, Professor Schooner mainly focused on the climate change aspect and underlined several drawbacks of the United States (US) approach in inserting sustainability considerations in PP.
Firstly, he mentioned the lack of sustainable infrastructure, particularly with regards to limited possibilities for bottom-line recycling.
Secondly, given that inserting sustainability aspects in PP involves interdisciplinary competing interests, ensuring compliance with all these standards is very challenging.
Thirdly, US law does not provide adequate instruments for monitoring sustainability in contract performance. For example, under US law, one can qualify as a fully responsible contractor in the construction industry while there are still fatal casualties during the contract performance process.
Fourthly, the 2023 edition of the US largest annual conference on PP – Government Procurement Conference – does not have a single symposium on green or social PP, which indicates a lack of political will to focus on considering the relationship between sustainability and PP.
When speaking about possible solutions for these problems, Professor Schooner expressed his scepticism about the economic approach of applying carbon taxes, as they are not very efficient in mitigating climate change. He, instead, welcomed approaches when contracting authorities apply incentives to use public transportation instead of private cars, for example, by giving free coupons.
Q&A
Q: In the context of Free Trade Agreements (FTAs), the sustainability aspects of the public procurement chapters, can discriminate against some purchasers, but is not discriminatory in the legal sense.
A (Prof. Schooner): If we accept the legal regimes of all industrialised countries in the world we will not mitigate climate change.
Q: We are a room of lawyers and law was not much mentioned. What can the legal scholarship do about this?
A (Prof. Schooner): The legal system will not save us from climate change. The legal system is drafted by legislators and adjudicators, which frequently represent privileged categories of populations. Some of them do little to change the legal system.
Q: Do we need a hierarchy among the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)? Do we need to prioritise and not overload the contracting authorities (who sometimes are not trained in this aspect)?
A (Prof. Schooner): Considering the broad range of the United Nations SDGs; applying sustainability aspects in PP is already difficult, and contracting authorities are not trained for this purpose. When everybody is special, no one is special.
Books recommended by Professor Schooner
- Kim Stanley Robinson “The Ministry for the Future” (Orbit Books 2020)
- Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway “The Collapse of Western Civilization a View from the Future” (Columbia University Press 2014)
- Kate Raworth “Doughnut Economics” (Chelsea Green Publishing 2018).
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