Establishing an enabling environment

Clearly, you want to make sure that buying sustainably and making contract awards according, in part, to sustainability criteria are compliant with the existing legal and policy context for procurement in your country.

In this section we explain how there is room for procurement practitioners to implement SPP in different contexts. We provide a checklist to evaluate your existing procurement laws and policies for SPP criteria. We also consider how to communicate them to relevant stakeholders which is essential to generate trust, and underpin effective SPP implementation. You will also find guidance on how this translates into specific actions at the end of the section.

Quickly evaluate your enabling environment

For a simple and quick way to carry out an overview of your enabling environment, we have created the following checklist:

Quick checklist - Evaluate your enabling environment

For a more detailed account of the process, and concepts, introduced on the checklist, keep reading this section.

Check evaluation or award criteria

In most countries, the existing laws and policies do not establish explicit provisions for considering sustainability in the procurement process. However, they always include certain principles, such as “fairness”, “equity”, “economy”, “value for money (VfM)”, “efficiency”, “effectiveness” to guide procurement decision-making processes.

When such principles are established, this often means that practitioners are urged to find the solution that best responds to the needs identified, while still offering the best price. Considering factors such as the quality of the solution, or how effective it is addressing the needs identified, often leaves room for also considering sustainability.

However, it might not be possible to consider these factors when setting evaluation criteria, as, in many cases, the contract has to be awarded to the lowest-price bid.

As this can be a key barrier, start by checking what your enabling environment establishes or requires regarding evaluation or award criteria, which are normally established at the national level, or by an international institution if a project is being funded by, for example, international development assistance. Depending on what the provisions regarding the use of award criteria are, we provide guidance on how you can implement SPP.

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How to implement SPP when you can only consider price as evaluation criteria.

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How to implement SPP when you can consider criteria other than price.

In Latin America and Africa in particular, procurement principles are often included in the constitution, and are sometimes referred to as principles that “govern the activities of public agencies” or the “expenditure of public funds”. Identifying these principles, and how they are defined, can help guide your decisions over what you can consider during the procurement process when comparing offers.

Identify key enablers for SPP

Within your procurement regime, there will be certain policy vehicles, such as framework agreements or competitive dialogue procedures, that can also play a major enabling role to deliver sustainable procurement. In this section we include information about what some of these mechanisms are, and what role they can play in the context of SPP.

Explicit provisions to include sustainability as award criteria

Open market engagement and ongoing dialogue

Framework agreements

Thresholds and sectors with distinct regulation

Targets and reserved contracts

Share your compliance trail

Once you have evaluated your enabling environment, you should clearly communicate how it underpins your SPP approach. This can translate into two key actions:

National authorities should clearly communicate the current enabling environment for SPP implementation in their SPP Action Plans, as well as any plans to develop new enabling policy or regulation.

Procurement practitioners should clearly communicate how their SPP approach is compliant with the existing enabling environment on a contract-by-contract basis. This can be by referring to the relevant section in the SPP Action Plan, or the documents that have been checked as part of the assessment.

As a quick way to go over the different regulatory and policy documents you might need to refer to, we have put together the following checklist:

This process will help to establish trust across the supplier market, as well as procurement practitioners, that SPP approaches have been well-designed and fit well into the current rules.

Reach out to support networks

When you are thinking about implementing SPP practices for the first time, it can be useful to learn from other teams who are also working on SPP initiatives. These networks provide an opportunity to openly share insights and best practices and learn from each other.

Some of the key international best practice networks include:

Establish an enabling environment