Sustainable Public Procurement: A Knight Guarding the Global Green Recovery in the Post-Pandemic Era?

Countries face financial crises, high inflation rates, and public health issues in the post-pandemic era. In response, many major economies are pursuing economic recovery plans to help citizens overcome the economic and social problems created by the pandemic. Public procurement is an important way for governments to implement economic recovery plans. Some countries, like the European Union (EU) member states and the United States (U.S.), use sustainable public procurement (SPP) to drive economic recovery while balancing the need for sustainable development. This approach aims to ensure citizens’ well-being by protecting the environment, investing in public health and providing jobs for impoverished populations. As of today, the WTO’s plurilateral Agreement on Government Procurement (GPA), FTAs’ chapter on GP, and other international procurement instruments constitute the legal framework for global SPP. How did these international procurement rules emerge and evolve to date? What policy space do they give governments to engage in SPP? What are the implications of SPP for the global green recovery in the post-pandemic era? This chapter will answer these questions. After a short introduction, the remainder of the chapter is structured as follows. Section 2 will introduce the development of SPP rules. It shows how international procurement rules (including SPP rules) were created and how countries, taking the EU as an example, localize these international rules. Section 3 will use the EU as an example of how GPA countries can promote SPP when facing GPA and non-GPA countries, respectively. Section 4 will discuss the impact of these EU-style SPP rules on the green recovery in the post-pandemic era. First, this section shows that governments can use sustainable procurement rules to promote sustainable development in the post-pandemic era. Secondly, this section also points out the limitations of SPP, especially their absence in non-GPA countries’ procurement markets. These limitations considerably diminish government procurement’s contribution to global green recovery. However, this section argues that SPP policies adopted by GPA countries can still significantly green supply chains and develop circular economies. Section 5 provides recommendations to make up for the limitations of EU regulations on SPP. This chapter concludes that while SPP cannot ensure global green recovery in the post-pandemic era, GPA countries can improve their SPP policies to contribute to the green recovery as much as possible.