The Governance of Strategic Procurement Beyond Methodological Nationalism: Shaped by Sectoral Challenges?

Regulators at the international, EU, and national level claim to transform public procurement from an instrument used to buy products at efficient prizes to a governance tool encouraging green economies, just supply chains or innovation. To date, research interest has focused on the programmatic and regulatory development of such strategic procurement. Few insights exist on the resulting procurement regimes and the institutions, interactions and logics that govern them. Procurement governance is central to assess outcomes of strategic procurement, and more generally capacity to steer markets in an era where economic intervention is back. Is procurement governance that steers participants towards strategic goals guided by national logics – as assumed in the literature – or do sectoral dynamics matter? Theoretically, a large literature expects governance logics to be shaped by national contexts and varieties of capitalism. General governance process’s pre-structure and habituate governance on strategic procurement, either via socialization of actors or through guidance of existing institutions. This paper builds on these insights but goes beyond by reappreciating the role of sectoral dynamics as critical mediator in this relationship. We propose that governance institutions, interactions and logics are shaped by sector specific challenges to procurement, which – then – interact with varieties of statehood to form distinct sectoral regimes of strategic procurement. Empirically, our case selection explores procurement in Germany in three sectors (health, social protection and defense) that display structural differences: sectors may, first, be embedded in national or regional markets often characterised by concentrated or single-supplier relationships (health, defense) or – instead – operate in local contexts, involving a mix of market and non-market actors (social protection). Besides, sector-specific pressures may prompt procurement to weight differently the relative importance of cost, quality, and labour factors: While some sectors are predominantly capital-intensive (defense), others are highly labour-intensive with staff costs accounting for the bulk of total expenditure (social protection) or provide a mix of capital- and technology-intensive goods and labour-intensive services (health). We posit that these sectoral differences affect the governance of strategic procurement. We assess, for each sector, the number and type of actors involved in governance, ranging from government and ministerial actors to intermediaries and agencies that engage in fostering strategic procurement. We also study interaction, by assessing frequency, fora and means of interaction or the involvement of stakeholders. Finally, we look at the role of institutions facilitating exchange and tools shaping knowledge about strategic procurement or lowering costs of purchasing social, green or innovation goals, e.g. via labels or preselected platforms or by providing contractual templates. Overall, we expect governance to array between logics with a high level of hierarchical steering and control, and logics where strategic goals depend more heavily on informal relationships between regulators and market actors, as well as coordination, allowing for exchange and mutual understanding. The paper is part of the project “Varieties of Procurement Regimes: How Do States Procure Strategically and to What Effect?" and draws on a series of expert interviews conducted in 2026. Fit with panel 8 or 3.