Public and Private Procurement in Environmental Governance

Abstract

Procurement has become an increasingly important method of environmental governance. Public actors at federal, state, and local levels in the United States have leveraged their significant purchasing power to reduce the environmental impacts of their purchases of goods, services, and energy. Other governments around the globe, including the European Union and many individual nation-states, have likewise adopted public environmentally preferable purchasing rules, with significant positive impacts. Finally, the private sector has increasingly used environmental supply chain management to reduce its environmental impacts. This Chapter (a) explores what motivates both public and private actors to adopt environmental procurement as a governance strategy, (b) examines the direct and indirect impacts of environmental procurement, (c) describes specific procurement rules in the United States and the European Union, and (d) argues that the use of private environmental supply chain management by business firms operates as a parallel form of environmental governance.

Keywords: supply chain management, procurement, environmentally preferable purchasing, green procurement, private environmental governance