A Best Value approach to public procurement

Abstract

The last couple of years the concept of the Circular Economy (CE) has been gaining more and more attention. The Netherlands want to become a CE as well and the government presented a national policy programme including goals to reach a CE in 2050. One of those goals is that Dutch public authorities should procure all their projects 100% circularly by 2030. Practice shows that in the infrastructure sector public authorities start with high circular ambitions, but throughout the procurement process it seems to diminish. Public authorities tend to specify their need in detail, and make little use of the knowledge and experience that is present in the supply chain. The fact that the circular ambitions are only partly reached after the realization of the project makes the public procurement process not very effective. A possible contribution to increase this effectiveness can be a specific procurement approach that focusses on utilizing the experience from the supply chain, called the Best Value approach (BVA). However, no literature so far has described the opportunities of the BVA as an approach to procure circular infrastructure in the Netherlands.

The goal of this research is to create a guideline for Dutch public authorities about how they can procure circular infrastructure more effectively by making use of the BVA. This results in the following research question: In what way, if any, can the Best Value approach contribute to the effectiveness of public procurement in order to stimulate the transition towards a circular infrastructure sector in the Netherlands?