Geographical Area
Basque CountryEurope
Scope
Regional
Home
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 sectorResources
/w=3840,quality=90,fit=scale-down)
Downloadable tools
Resource directory
Case study database
Guide to ecolabels 
Open SPP FAQs
In the Spanish Region of the Basque Country, publicly-owned company Ihobe has been in charge of the region’s Green Public Procurement Strategy since 2009.
As part of their strategy, they prioritized procurement categories, and developed standardized green criteria for 30 product categories. To decide what criteria to include, they organized thematic discussion forums with industry organizations, and potential regional suppliers, and assessed the current level of compliance with the proposed criteria (the European Union’s GPP criteria).
As a result, they created three levels of criteria for each product category: basic, advanced and excellence. The aim of these levels was to use Green Public Procurement (GPP) as an instrument to promote the sustainability work already being done by regional suppliers, while encouraging them to comply with higher levels of green criteria. As over 90% of regional companies are SMEs, this strategy also helped to ensure that these companies were not left out of GPP procurement opportunities.
The Basque Country’s Green Procurement and Contracting Programme 2030 shows that in 2020 62% of all public contracts containing environmental criteria were awarded to Basque companies.