From Green to Social Procurement

Public procurement has recently been considered one of the key actors for achieving sustainable goals and contributing to mitigation and adaptation policies against climate change. In fact, public procurement effectively could play this key role, due to his huge impact on global GDP. This chapter shows that public procurement is at a mature level in achieving green products, but there is still a long road ahead when adopting public procurement to enhance effective equal rights and to protect minorities. In fact, if green procurement is at an advanced stage of the process, since there are solid international recognized standards and a huge set of tools for monitoring results, it is still difficult for public authorities awarding contracts to verify that contracts respects human rights and work conditions belong the whole supply chain via public procurement, due to lack of specific competences, the high costs of monitoring, and few international standards. The chapter, after a deep description of tools in greening products works and services, emphasizes how to abate barriers via social procurement, giving best practices at international level for evaluating competitors in a sustainable way. Finally, some recommendations are given to policy makers in order to set up a sort of revolution of “sustainable procurement.”