Completed NRP 73 research project: Sustainable public procurement

​Each year, over 40 billion Swiss francs is spent in public procurement at the federal, cantonal and municipal levels, 2.3 trillion in the EU, and 9.7 trillion globally. To analyse how legislation can facilitate a more sustainable public procurement, Peter Seele from the University of Italian Switzerland and his team analysed over 85’000 public procurement tenders at federal, cantonal and municipal level. The project included an in-depth case study of Swiss ICT procurement.

The results reveal a sustainability gap in past and present public procurement. To close this gap, the researchers developed a decision tree for procurers and analysed legal feasibility of sustainability indicators. They suggest giving responsibility for sustainability decisions to individual procurers, instead of relying only on a formalized “tick-a-box” exercises.

The project was supported by a sounding board that includes public procurers, procurers from FOEN, a federal judge working on procurement cases and aims to create further multi-stakeholder dialogues.

Peer-reviewed publications of the research project:

Knebel, Sebastian; Seele, Peter (2021). Framing Sustainability in Public Procurement by typologizing Sustainability Indicators – The Case of Switzerland. Journal of Public Procurement.
https://doi.org/10.1108/JOPP-09-2020-0066

Knebel, Sebastian; Seele, Peter (2020): Introducing Public Procurement Tenders as Part of Corporate Communications. A typological analysis based on CSR reporting indicators. Corporate Communications: An international journal. https://doi.org/10.1108/CCIJ-01-2020-0029