Public procurement can contribute significantly to achieving sustainable development. The Dutch government has indicated that sustainable procurement is one of its priorities and has developed and installed a Sustainable Public Procurement Programme (SPPP). This essay reviews the current programme and assesses its actual contribution to sustainable development. Specific questions are raised with respect to both the set up and the content of the current decision criteria for supplier selection and contract provisions. This article argues that, so far, the focus on minimum requirements, the strict distinction between environmental and social criteria and the absence of specific long-term ambitions and a systems perspective have limited the actual contribution of the Dutch SPPP to sustainable development. Finally, ongoing discussions by involved stakeholders, with respect to suggested adjustments to the programme, are reviewed and linked to the assessment presented here. It is concluded that these discussions reflect promising trains of thought for the future of the Dutch SPPP.
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This report summarizes the work done by Thematic Working Group 4 (TWG4) on “Procurement and Tendering” for e-bus deployment. It further analyses the various Good Practices collected by project partners with a reference to the above aspects. This report takes the policy learning one step further and sheds light on regional similarities and differences in practices that have been found functional and worth spreading.
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The Dutch government, in alignment with the Paris climate agreement, has expressed the ambition to reduce CO 2 emissions in the Netherlands by 49% in 2030 compared to 1990. As freight transport is recognized as a serious CO 2 emitter, this sector is confronted with a substantial part of the target. For cities, the reduction of the urban freight transport emissions is, next to the CO 2 reduction, also important to improve the air quality. Dutch municipalities take an active role in coordination, facilitation and acceleration of the emission reduction processes, not only via regulation but also by using their public procurement power. This paper describes the City of Rotterdam's experiences from the EU Horizon 2020 BuyZET project. This project was launched in November 2016 and includes the cities of Rotterdam, Oslo and Copenhagen. The project aims at understanding and optimising the impact of public procurement activities on transport patterns and emissions in cities as well as to find innovative and sustainable delivery solutions for goods and services-related transport in order to reduce emissions.
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Authorities aim at making the urban freight system more sustainable. The most common instruments to do so are regulation or stimulation of good practices, by offering subsidies or initiating projects together with the private parties that are responsible for actually performing urban freight transport operations. This contribution examines the possibilities for (local) authorities to use their market role, i.e. being a big procurer of goods and services in a city that result in many urban freight transport trips, to stimulate more sustainable urban freight transportation. Procurement is usually not linked to transport and data from procured goods and services do not provide sufficient insights to estimates the impacts of deliveries and trips related to the procured goods and services. This contribution discusses two cases in which (local) authorities try to make the urban freight transport that results from their procurement activities visible, via different methods, such as delivery service plans, and spend analyses. The cases of Rotterdam (in the project BuyZET) and for the logistics hub in The Hague show the first results of how (local) authorities can act to improve urban freight transport once the trips caused by procured goods and services are clearly mapped. © 2019 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/)
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from the article: Supply chain integration intensifies through digitalisation of business administration (BA) processes. However, it is unclear whether differences exist between the public and private sector in development or implementation of supply chain integration solutions. The large scope of the supply chain, being a large network of companies working together towards one end product, is limited for this study to e-procurement processes. The related software solutions are included. This study starts with a theoretical snapshot of e-procurement. This is followed by a process viewpoint of the e-procurement function. Next five different forms of e-procurement cooperation are presented seen from an actors network viewpoint. The utilisation of these forms create insight in the differences between the public and private sector in their e-procurement adoption behaviour. The process maturity scan results shows that the process maturity between the two sectors is comparable. However, this only explains the differences per sector concerning their ability to improve and control their processes in general. For reliability, this step is followed by three in-depth interviews combined with analyses of recent e-procurement behaviour studies involving the two sectors. The final step compares the maturity outcome with the in-depth data results. Both sectors show certain forms of coalition in the e-procurement. Where ‘competition’ is a construct that drives the private sector, the public sector has cost control as a driver towards collaboration and integration within e-procurement. This can only partially be explained by the past European financial crises. Differences are found in digital collaboration and the integration itself. The most important difference lies in the European tendering procedure to which the public sector (unlike the private) is restricted. In nature an e-procurement design and development project does not fit the prescribed procedures.
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This paper analyses Amsterdam’s Startup-in-Residence (SiR) programme as new type of policy to engage startups in the development of urban innovation through a challenge-based public procurement of innovation (PPI) process. The programme is being mimicked by other cities and government agencies, but so far there has not been a rigorous, theoretically-informed analysis of the approach. In this paper, we specify and focus on the role of city-based, public-affiliated intermediaries as initiators, moderators and influencers of conversations between startups and the local government. The main contribution of SiR as a PPI intermediation programme has been to launch new types of fruitful conversations on several levels, that lead to institutional innovations rather than direct solutions for urban problems or startup development. In this sense, SiR fulfils a role inquiring and ascribing urban challenges with values and notions of “worth” that preceded and shaped innovation directions. We also suggest that engaging startups is effective for only a limited bandwidth urban challenges; different types of intermediation are required to foster collaborative innovation in more complex settings.
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In Germany, public transport organizations are mainly owned by public authorities. Procurement in Hamburg involves the buses and infrastructure instead of transport services. The procurement process for buses and infrastructure is performed by the transport companies. Such processes must meet German and European public regulations. Therefore, public tender and procurement procedures for buying buses by German Public Transport Operators (PTOs) can be more complex and lengthier than procurement by private PTOs in other countries. As a result, the public transport companies are not primarily driven by profitability, but also by obligations towards the public and political aims. Obligations can comprise to provide affordable, environmentallyfriendly transport services for the citizens. In Hamburg, the public authority incorporates obligations (requirements) for the e-buses in their tendering documents. In Utrecht, as well as most of the rest of the Netherlands, public transport is carried out by private companies, under an operating contract (concession) with a public transport authority. In Utrecht, this authority is the province of Utrecht. The e-buses are the operators’ private property and they are obliged to account to the province of Utrecht for their implementation of public transport. When the province of Utrecht procures the operation of public transport services by means of a European tendering process, private transport companies can offer a bid for this tender. Both, the authority and operators, want to provide good public transport for their customers, but they both have different goals. The operators want to earn a reasonable profit margin on public transport, while the authority wants to fulfil certain public policy goals. The tendering process is where these two come together. It is a strong mechanism to get the best ‘value for money’ out of the market – for example, the most public transport, or the highest number of e-buses running in the area, within the available budget of the public transport authority.
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A growing amount of (semi) public organizations in the Netherlands write tenders with mandatory social conditions. It is important for SMEs to focus on social procurement in their business strategy. SMEs should be proactive and try to affect the conditions (semi) public organizations write in their tenders. On the other hand, (semi) public organizations should facilitate SMEs by developing transparent procurement processes and by organizing information meetings with SMEs. The most important factor for an effective social procurement procedure seems to be the dialogue between SMEs, purchasers and the persons responsible for matching target groups. Because it seems easier for SMEs to meet social procurement conditions if they cooperate with other SMEs and set up labour pools, we performed an exploratory research on the formation of labour pools. The labour pools can be set up by SMEs in the same branch or in a cooperation chain. Our research shows that entrepreneurs require a lot of perseverance in developing a labour pool. It also appears that labour pools without commitment of public authorities are not effective.
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City governments increasingly experiment with civic participation in the procurement and the realization of smart city technologies in order to improve the incorporation of human values. In this paper, a model is proposed with the level of participation, the continuity of participation and the extent of institutional embedding to illustrate how challenging these experiments are. The City of Amsterdam also experiments with its procurement approach for a new camera car service that ensures an ethically responsible, privacy-friendly and secure collection of images from public space. Two starting points drive this change: 1) in order to have more control over the data, the municipality develops its own machine learning models for processing the images and 2) a multi-stakeholder co-design project including a citizen panel – is an integral part of the process in which the service is designed and realized. To support this new procurement process, a group of design-researchers were involved in a collaborative case study to identify requirements relevant for the tender. An analysis of the case study findings along the three dimensions brings us to the conclusion that the approach developed by the City of Amsterdam is a fruitful encounter between ‘doing ethics’ and procurement. The lessons of this procurement approach for ‘doing ethics’ are claimed to be of value for other practical contexts and further research.
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The Interreg Europe eBussed project supports the transition of European regions towards low carbon mobility and more efficient transport. The regions involved are Turku (Finland), Hamburg (Germany), Utrecht (The Netherlands), Livorno (Italy), South Transdanubia (Hungary) and Gozo island in Malta. It promotes the uptake of e-busses in new regions and supports the expansion of existing e-fleets. Within the project, there are four thematic working groups formed that aim at delivering a best practices report and policy recommendations to be used in the partner regions. Thematic Working Group 4 (TWG4) focusses on the topics of Procurement, Tendering and Costs of e-busses. As a starting point for TWG4, the value chain for e-bus public transport per region has been mapped. By mapping how the value chain for e-bus public transport works and defining the nature of the issues, problems or maybe challenges per region can be better understood.
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