Call for Papers | IJPA Special Issue on Green Public Procurement

Dear IJPA Community,

We are inviting proposals for IJPA’s special issue on Green Public Procurement. Please see the CfP below and researchers and practitioners who are interested please submit your abstracts to guest editors Dr. Plaček or Dr. Rosell before the 15 November, 2022 deadline.

Michal Plaček, Ambis College, Prague, Czech Republic and Faculty of Social Science, Charles University, [e-mail]

Jordi Rosell, Universitat de Girona, [e-mail]

If you don’t directly work on the specific topic but are interested to publish your work with IJPA, you are welcome to submit your manuscript directly to the journal.

Green Public Procurement to Transform Society and Boost the Economy

01Background

Public procurement is a crucial public practice that affects relations between companies and government and is one that has shifted from serving a primarily administrative or bureaucratic function to constituting a strategic activity used to support and deliver government objectives. Green public procurement (GPP) refers to “a process whereby public authorities seek to procure goods, services and works with a reduced environmental impact throughout their life cycle when compared to goods, services and works with the same primary function that would otherwise be procured” (Alhola et al., 2019; Pacheco – Blanco, Bastante Checa, 2016). Against this backdrop, public administrations have begun to integrate issues of environmental sustainability in their policies. They are doing so by developing and applying strategies to make constant improvements in their environmental performance, integrating environmental considerations into all of their operations and facilities and including related decision-making processes.

The GPP became increasingly important as the European Union (EU) Circular Economy Action Plan (2020) highlights that the EU has spent more than 14 % of its GDP through public procurement (Sönnichsen and Clement, 2020). The action plan also discussed that how public procurement processes can influence markets and contribute to greener and more sustainable production and services (Sönnichsen and Clement, 2020). In December 2021, the World Bank recommends GPP practices, with a goal of using GPP as a part of the modern procurement practice (World Bank, 2021).

The discussion about GPP has been concentrated in several journals dedicated to environmental and multidisciplinary sciences, followed by journals in the fields of production, operation, and procurement, and by journals in general managerial science (Cheng et al., 2018). Despite the rapidly increasing number of papers from 2017 onwards (Cheng et al., 2018), GPP as a topic has penetrated journals in the field of public administration slowly. According to several up-to-date literature reviews (e.g. Jensen, De Boer, 2019; Cheng, et al., 2018; Igarashi, 2013; Rainville, 2017; Tseng et al., 2019) on the topic of supplier selection, most papers are technically oriented and dealing with conceptual development, drivers and barriers, collaboration with supply chain partners, mathematical and other optimization models, assessment of green supply chain management practices, performance and specific impacts of GPP implementation, policy implications, regulation matters, practices and uptake issues.

We still miss information about how different institutional contexts influence the adoption of GPP, which institutional factors are important and which not, how different social mechanism work on the level of procurers in case of decision about GPP, how the procurers solve different trade-offs in the process of awarding green contracts. We also should evaluate if we still can use current public administration theories for explaining GPP issues and how the behavioural approach can help us to explain motives behind public procurers’ decisions.

02Themes

Given the importance of GPP and several identified challenges, this call for papers encourages research to cover following major themes:

1. Drivers and barriers of GPP diffusion: GPP complexity, individual and behavioral aspects (beliefs, awareness, habits, preferences, risk aversion, training/expertise), organizational aspects (size, strategies and policies, supplier selection processes, contracts, training, organizational culture), contextual aspects (supranational/national regulation, policy and control, cross-departmental management and coordination, sharing of knowledge transparency of public tendering, the level of corruption), emergency situations (the COVID-19 pandemic, the Ukraine crisis) see for example (Plaček at al., 2021, Badell and Rosell, 2021). Although most of GPP research has been conducted in Europe (Cheng et al., 2018), other areas are welcome.

2. Effects of GPP implementation: impact on competition in public procurement, the extent to which policy objectives are met, impacts on small and medium-sized enterprises, impacts on equal access to public goods and services.

3. Trade of between green and other sustainability criteria: green criteria crowding out other important evaluation criteria such as support for local companies, employment or the socially disadvantaged.

4. Implication for policy makers: lessons learned, tools for improving level of implementation of GPP.

IJPA aims to publish both theoretically strong and empirically rigorous manuscripts. Scholars are encouraged to submit original research articles that use full spectrum of qualitative, quantitative and experimentally oriented methods. We especially welcome cross-country comparative studies.

时间：2022年7月31日

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2022.07.31