Public Procurement for the SDGs – Rethinking the Basics

Abstract

Public procurement is a fundamental lever to achieve the SDGs. However, in the past forty years or so the potential contribution of public procurement to achieve environmental and social goals has been much limited by an ideology approach requiring exclusive focus on economic savings. We need to reconsider the way think of procurement and we do procurement if we really want it to help in meeting the wider societal targets linked to the SDGs. This renewed approach must be translated into user-friendly operative tools for procurers accompanied by a complete and integrated set of professionalization efforts targeting both buyers and sellers to make sure that the procurement market works smoothly and the advantages of fair competition are not lost.

Keywords: sdgs, public procurement