Background Public procurement is a crucial public practice that affects relations between companies and government and is one that has shifted from serving a primarily administrative or bureaucratic function to constituting a strategic activity used to support and deliver government objectives. Green public procurement (GPP) refers to “a process whereby public authorities seek to procure goods, services and works with a reduced environmental impact throughout their life cycle when compared to goods, services and works with the same primary function that would otherwise be procured” (Alhola et al., 2019; Pacheco – Blanco, Bastante Checa, 2016). Against this backdrop, public administrations have begun to integrate issues of environmental sustainability in their policies. They are doing so by developing and applying strategies to make constant improvements in their environmental performance, integrating environmental considerations into all of their operations and facilities and including related decision-making processes. The GPP became increasingly important as the European Union (EU) Circular Economy Action Plan (2020) highlights that the EU has spent more than 14 % of its GDP through public procurement (Sönnichsen and Clement, 2020). The action plan also discussed that how public procurement processes can influence markets and contribute to greener and more sustainable production and services (Sönnichsen and Clement, 2020). In December 2021, the World Bank recommends GPP practices, with a goal of using GPP as a part of the modern procurement practice (World Bank, 2021). The discussion about GPP has been concentrated in several journals dedicated to environmental and multidisciplinary sciences, followed by journals in the fields of production, operation, and procurement, and by journals in general managerial science (Cheng et al., 2018). Despite the rapidly increasing number of papers from 2017 onwards (Cheng et al., 2018), GPP as a topic has penetrated journals in the field of public administration slowly. According to several up-to-date literature reviews (e.g. Jensen, De Boer, 2019; Cheng, et al., 2018; Igarashi, 2013; Rainville, 2017; Tseng et al., 2019) on the topic of supplier selection, most papers are technically oriented and dealing with conceptual development, drivers and barriers, collaboration with supply chain partners, mathematical and other optimization models, assessment of green supply chain management practices, performance and specific impacts of GPP implementation, policy implications, regulation matters, practices and uptake issues. We still miss information about how different institutional contexts influence the adoption of GPP, which institutional factors are important and which not, how different social mechanism work on the level of procurers in case of decision about GPP, how the procurers solve different trade-offs in the process of awarding green contracts. We also should evaluate if we still can use current public administration theories for explaining GPP issues and how the behavioural approach can help us to explain motives behind public procurers’ decisions. Given the importance of GPP and several identified challenges, this call for papers encourages research to cover following major themes:
IJPA aims to publish both theoretically strong and empirically rigorous manuscripts. Scholars are encouraged to submit original research articles that use full spectrum of qualitative, quantitative and experimentally oriented methods. We especially welcome cross-country comparative studies. |