The infrastructure industry is an industry that causes a severe threat to sustainability as it consumes a large amount of energy, resources and materials. The circular economy (CE) provides the opportunity to address this issue because CE is characterised by reducing the carbon footprint, using primary materials and protecting material resources. By recycling construction materials and use second-hand construction materials, it is possible to address this issue.

High reaching ambitions on circularity are created by the Dutch government and public organisations for the infrastructure industry. Researchers explain that public procurement can contribute to achieve these circular ambitions. Especially in the infrastructure sector, public organisations have a large purchasing volume. They can stimulate and create demands for a product that contributes to CE by including it in their procurement. However, because of the developing character of circularity, circular public procurement is a new challenging field that lacks empirical research.

To realise circular procurement in practice, ambitions need to be clearly formulated for a project. This is not yet explored enough, and the question of how to deal with the challenging ambitions in projects is still unanswered. In this research is discovered how public organisations strategize their organisational ambitions on the project level during the preparation of procurement. The strategizing of organisational ambitions on the project level is recognised as a process. Therefore, two real-life projects are analysed by using process research to explore the used strategies.

The research results show us that two public organisations show two different approaches of strategizing in which several contextual factors play a significant role. On the one side, a highly emergent strategy is preferred when it is acceptable to release the organisational boundaries and restrictions. On the other side, a partly deliberate and partly emergent strategy is preferred when it is a situation in which organisational boundaries play a significant role in the innovation process. Eventually, both strategies discovered in the case studies can be applied to determine how organisational ambitions can be strategized on a project level in other situations concerning new initiatives (like circularity in this research).