Lecture by Max Müngersdorff © Tim Stoffel
From 16 to 18 June, the Public Procurement: Global Revolution IX Conference took place in Nottingham, UK, for the ninth time. Dr Maximilian Müngersdorff and Tim Stoffel, both researcher at DIE, presented their research on sustainable public procurement to an international audience.
At the conference, tendencies in approaching the topic became visible that have also been shown in the MUPASS research project, conducted together with the Service Agency Communities in One World (SKEW): Sustainable public procurement is receiving increasing attention by policy makers and practitioners alike. At the same time, there is a shift in how the topic is being approached. Presentations by representatives of international organisations, like OECD, showed that those organisations have already integrated sustainability into their concepts for public procurement and now increasingly focus on implementation and mutual learning, when dealing with the topic. Based on the research at DIE, this was a predictable development: “Legal frameworks worldwide already allow for the consideration of social and ecological aspects in public procurement. The main challenge now is to support actors in implementation”, Tim Stoffel put it.
The MUPASS project shows that change management within administrations and supporting them with practical implementation is central for the realisation of sustainable procurement practices in municipalities. At the third MUPASS Dialogue Forum, which will take place in October 2019, municipal actors from Germany, Europe, Sub-Sahara Africa, and Latin America come together to learn from each other within a framework of transformative research for sustainable public procurement.