How States Procure? A framework to analyse Governance of Public Procurement and its Strategic Challenges across Countries and Sectors

How states procure good and services has major implications. At best, it can shape economies and societies to the benefit of all, e.g., through providing local stimuli for employment, supporting energy transition through low-carbon public transport or improving working conditions along the supply chain. At worst, it is a vehicle for corruption, fraud, waste and mismanagement and creates controversy around transparency, accountability and consultation procedures. Public procurement has long been considered a topic for strategic management research that focuses on the economics of procurement. In this literature, procurement is typically understood as focussed on a competitive prize (short term goal) or as subject for innovation and industrial policies (medium and long term goals). The last 15 years have seen an increasing challenge to this narrative. Empirically, public procurement regulation and practice no longer consider prize only when awarding public contracts. Social and green criteria are used to assure sustainable procurement, and innovation is an increasingly important goal This has opened the processes of public procurement to questions of governance and public policy. Our paper offers a theoretical and conceptual framework to analyse public procurement in the EU. Building on existing concepts and measures of public policy analysis, we will conceptualize social, environmental and innovation goals beyond market efficiency in regulation. We suggest a ‘law in action’ approach that covers a variety of governance attributes across actors and stages of the EU multilevel system. We illustrate how our framework allows to map and characterize the evolution of public procurement, such as changes from a commercial best-prize public procurement ideology to a more sustainable concept of public procurement, and investigate differences between sectors stimulating innovation through public procurement or supporting changing market behaviour to reach climate goals.