Pathways for integrating socially responsible public procurement in municipalities

The Policy Brief summarises the reasearch on the different pathways German municipalities use to introduce and implement sustainable public procurement. By deriving policy recommendations from qualitative research for the regulatory, the institutional, and the individual dimension we developed a 'Sustainable Public Procurement Map' that gathers the various approaches and can be used by practitioners to better understand ways for integrating sustainability criteria in public procurement and to classify their own actions. We deduced 9 policy recoomendations from the research: Political decision-makers should (1) make laws and regulations on SRPP clear and ambitious.Municipal decision-makers should (2) ensure compliance bycivil servants and translate SRPP regulations, policies and targets as precisely and clearly as possible; (3) promote a broad motivation for thetopic through exchange, cooperation and training; (4) strengthen the competencies of the central procurement office and ensure functioning communication structures between decentralised departments/persons involved in procurement; (5) make human resources available and allocate responsibility (having a person formally responsible for SRPP implementation makes its achievement more likely); and (6) make use of external support and resources to promote the topic.Actors working on socially responsible public procurement within the municipality and in NGOs should (7) provide local decision-makers and procurers with tailored information on the importance and implementation of SRPP.Officials working on public procurement should (8) work towards understanding their procurement, for example, by conducting a status analysis to define targets on SRPP implementation; and (9) facilitate and use external input and support by engaging in exchanges on SRPP with officialsupport bodies, civil society, consulting institutions and l frontrunner municipalities.