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Introduction

How to use this toolkit

What is Open SPP?

What our users told us

Plan

Establish an enabling environment

Prioritize

Monitoring & evaluation

Build support and capabilities

Create an Action Plan

Implement

Assess needs

Choose a procurement method

Engage with the market

Set sustainability criteria

Prepare contract obligations

Monitor implementation

Open data & measuring progress

Options for data use

SPP uptake

Carbon reduction

Gender inclusion

Life cycle costing

Economic Development

Sector guidance

Construction sector

ICT sector

Resources

Downloadable tools

Resource directory

Case study database

Guide to ecolabels

Open SPP FAQs

Managing sustainability throughout the contract

After you have introduced the sustainability criteria to be met by suppliers, you have to decide how you will monitor compliance against it. As introduced in the previous section, details regarding the process should be openly discussed with the supplier, and agreed upon as part of the procurement contract.

In this section, we include some of the mechanisms that can be used to monitor compliance against sustainability criteria during contract implementation. Establishing these mechanisms is essential to ensure that the purpose of introducing sustainability criteria is fulfilled, and to gather the necessary data to measure progress against the broader goals that have been set as part of the Open SPP strategy.

Providing clear channels for user and citizen feedback One of the key elements of Open SPP is having clear open channels to gather feedback from users and citizens. As previously mentioned, this can refer to the overall monitoring of public procurement practices to ensure transparency. However, this can also refer to mechanisms that monitor compliance with sustainability clauses in public contracts; we introduce this idea here and further develop with examples in the ICT and construction sectors.

How can you monitor performance during contract implementation?

There are different mechanisms that can be used to monitor performance against the agreed sustainability criteria in your contract. Below, we have included some of the steps that can be taken to gather the needed performance data, framed around performance vs compliance.

We are all still learning what works to improve sustainability and enable a fundamental shift in the way the government buys goods, works and services to achieve better social and environmental outcomes, so this exercise should not be seen a ‘gotcha’ to catch out contractors and punish them, but rather as a way of learning, iterating, and improving on what works. Tim Cummins, President of the World Commerce and Contracting Association, discusses this in his article: If saving the world depends on contracts, is it time to give up?

For more examples of how to monitor implementation in specific procurement category contracts, see sections on construction, and ICT procurement.

Resources

• Commitment Matters. 2021. If saving the world depends on contracts, is it time to give up?
• OCP. 2020. Procurement monitoring in a digital world: our new series sharing best practices.
• Integrity Action. 2022. Development check.

Case study

With the establishment of the ProZorro e-procurement system in Ukraine in 2016, Transparency International Ukraine established a network of civil society procurement monitors, called DoZorro. Within three years this had swelled to two dozen organizations, and over 2 million people had visited the website.

What’s more, in that time frame the DoZorro community uncovered violations in over 30,000 tenders with an estimated value of $4 billion. More than 100,000 people use their procurement monitoring system each month, and violations have been fixed in 14% of cases.

This monitoring is officially embedded in the government e-procurement system, and the inspiring results have inspired similar networks in other countries in the region and beyond.