Green and innovative public procurement for accelerating the sustainable transition on a municipal level

Abstract

Despite the importance of public procurement in the European Union and Norway's international policy agenda as a strategic tool to encourage innovation and achieve environmental goals, it ignores the role of public procurement in guiding and stimulating sustainable transformations, especially in municipalities, which require fundamental changes in social, environmental, and economic structures. This study links the areas of Green public procurement GPP and Innovative Public Procurement IPP, into a single concept green and innovative public procurement (GIPP) and then study it in the context of sustainable transformation in a municipality. Therefore, the broader aim of this study is to examine the role of (GIPP) as a mechanism for sustainable transformation in municipalities by developing a framework that links public procurement with the multi-level perspective (MLP) from transition studies. The study analyzed the critical issues related to the factors affecting the implementation of (GIPP) and concluded that it is an interactive and contextual process consisting of necessary and contingent relationships which are analyzed through (MLP) to drive the transformation at the municipal level. In the end the study revealed that sustainable transformation at the local level occurs because of the interaction of teams, tools, and tasks in the context of fundamental changes in institutions, policies, and administrations at the niche level of (MLP). In niche level will network expand to include other actors who drive change with use new tools to achieve new tasks supporting by contextual factors. In GIPP framework, teams mean suppliers, buyer, users, producers, public authority, policy makers, stakeholder, scientists, entrepreneurs, researcher. Those behind the demand, production, provision, use and consumption of green and innovative purchases, and other people and organizations involved (founders, inventors, financial institutions, political authorities at various levels, etc.). They all exist in a network of interactions, each of them performing its functions using tools which are (knowledge, procurement activities and process) supporting by a new administrative context (new goals, strategies, and structure), new policies and institutional changes (in rules, laws, guidelines, and organizational culture).