Public Procurement Prize

Published on January 25, 2021

The Hungarian Public Procurement Authority founded the Public Procurement Prize in 2018. The goal of the Prize is to promote the application of sustainability aspects in public procurements and to acknowledge compliant, sustainable and outstanding public procurement procedures.

The National Green Public Procurement Action Plan is currently being drafted.

Contracting entities could compete for the Prize with public procurement procedures focusing on and implementing sustainable, green, social and innovative aspects. The Prize is awarded in three categories: public supply, public services and public works.

The value of public procurements accounted for 6,9% of the Hungarian GDP in 2020, meaning that the application of sustainability aspects in public procurements has a huge impact on sustainable consumption. In this respect, sustainability and the related awareness-raising is one of the main objectives of the Public Procurement Authority, which seeks to draw special attention to the practical implementation of sustainable (green, social and innovative) public procurement in Hungary.

In 2018 the Authority launched its program titled ’2018 – Year of Sustainable Public Procurement’. As part of the program, the Authority hands out the Public Procurement Prize annually and launched a micro-website focusing on sustainable public procurement, to share all related information and best practices.

Apart from acknowledging professional public procurement achievements, the Public Procurement Prize also aims to draw attention to the importance of applying green, social and innovative criteria in public procurement procedures. The Prize is handed out in the three purchasing categories: public supply, public service and public works.

In 2021 the Public Procurement Authority launched its new initiative titled ‘Program for a Sustainable Hungary’. As a first step of this program the Public Procurement Authority set up a working group for sustainability, by inviting the largest Hungarian contracting authorities and other entities engaged in sustainability to develop a common knowledge basis and primarily, to share best practices. The summaries of the meetings of the sustainability working group are available at the website of the Public Procurement Authority.

The Authority also drafted and published a Green Code Ethics, which entered into force on 1 September 2021, in order to support the aspects of environmental and economic sustainability in public procurements. Any contracting authority is welcome to join the Code on a voluntary basis, provided that it commits itself to the application of sustainability aspects in the public procurement procedure.