Buying with impact: Stimulating sustainable public procurement in the construction sector through collaborative practices

Abstract

Public organisations are shifting their focus towards the implementation of sustainability into their projects through sustainable public procurement, but recent studies indicated that the implementation is still lacking. Sustainable public procurement is only implemented in around 10% of the Dutch public procurement tenders (Yu et al. 2020). One of the reasons for the lack of implementation is the added complexity to the job of the procurement specialist. MVI platform helps these procurement specialists by guiding them through this complex task. During their work they found out that a lot of potential positive impact is lost at the start of a project. The most potential for impact is found in the civil construction sector, due to the size of its projects. Because of this potential, the graduation project is aimed at stimulating sustainable public procurement for civil construction projects. This graduation project focusses on the design of an intervention at the early stages of a project in order to start creating more positive social and environmental impact. This is done through the design of practices that support a pragmatic and collaborative approach. During these practices, a mix of vision, management and execution stakeholders come together to share ideas, discuss and prioritize in order to decide which role sustainability should play within the project. The community of practice theory and boundary object theory as well as the SDG procurement compass from MVI platform were used to give shape to the practices. During the graduation project, two practices were created in the form of online workshops. The first workshop focussed on the definition of sustainable ambitions within the project. During the second workshop, the participants formulated measurable goals and made a list of actions and key stakeholders. The workshops were tested during multiple case studies, and iterations on the workshops were made based on the received feedback. After iterations, the early stage intervention, also called SDG impact kick-off, is designed to be a set of three workshops. The ambitions -, actions -, and stakeholders workshop. Although it was not possible to measure the actual impact of the workshops on the projects that were used as case studies, the feedback and results from the workshop seemed promising. The workshops clarified how sustainability could be implemented and helped to create a concrete implementation plan. A plan that helps project leaders with integrating sustainability and helps procurement specialist with setting up sustainable public procurement procedures. All in all, these collaborative practices are believed to aid in the creation of more positive sustainable impact in construction projects. The workshops of the SDG impact kick-off form a beginning of a practice that makes sustainability an integral part of any project.