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  5. Sustainable public procurement in Switzerland: revision of the law
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Sustainable public procurement in Switzerland: revision of the law

How environmental and social public procurement influences the transformation of sustainability in the public and private sectors:
The role of the revision of public procurement law in Switzerland.

Factsheet

Situation

Public procurement will play a central role in the transformation to a sustainable society. This is partly due to the large volume of public procurement and partly due to the role model function of the public sector. Accordingly, it is crucial to gain a deeper understanding of the mechanisms underlying sustainable public procurement. Since 2021, the new Swiss Procurement Act has enshrined sustainability as an objective of public procurement. But how do contracting authorities implement this objective? Do they include sustainable public procurement criteria in their tender documents? And if so, what weight do they give to sustainability criteria compared to "price"? And how is the private sector reacting to the new public procurement law? Do companies reinforce their sustainable behaviour when they win public tenders?

Course of action

This four-year interdisciplinary research project is divided into three sub-studies that build directly on each other. In study 1, we will operationalise the identification of sustainable public procurement criteria in tender documents using Natural Language Processing (NLP) methods. By extracting relevant information on award- and bidder-related criteria as well as other data from tender documents, new insights into the huge corpus of unstructured text data will be gained. Study 2 uses the data extracted in Study 1 and analyses it to assess its impact on the public sector, i.e. on the implementation practices of sustainable public procurement by contracting authorities in different regions and sectors in Switzerland. Study 3 analyses the impact of public procurement on the private sector and how the procurement reform influences this impact. Compared to Study 2, which focuses on the impact on tender documents - the demand side of the public procurement market - the focus here is on the impact of the reform on business sustainability - the supply side of the public procurement market. In general, the public sector is expected to play a central role in the transformation towards more sustainability.

Result

As a basis for these studies, we will build a data set that is probably unique in the world. The available procurement data includes tender documents from 2018 to 2023 with more than 39,000 tenders (1.05 million files, 3.87 terabytes of data), around 8,000 additional tender procedures are added every year by our crawling platform IntelliProcure. Utilising this data allows us to carry out a pre-post analysis of the new legislation: On the one hand, we will analyse the procurement criteria in around 24,000 tender documents prior to the revision of the law in 2021. On the other hand, we can analyse those tender documents that have been published since 2021, as well as the additional 50,000 or so tender documents that are expected to be added during the research project (2024-2028). In addition to this extensive dataset on public procurement, we will cross-reference unique information on the environmental sustainability of companies that will allow us to assess the impact of public procurement and the new law with SPP on the private sector. Using economic data on more than 2000 companies, we will be able to link procurement to more than 30 measures of corporate environmental sustainability.

Looking ahead

In addition to scientific progress, an important goal of this research project is to achieve an impact in practice. We therefore want to promote sustainable public procurement, improve the measurability of sustainability for business and civil society and ultimately increase the number of companies that offer services and products that follow ecological principles. The practical aim of this research project is therefore to increase sustainability in the public and private sectors by making public procurement more sustainable.

Contact

Prof. Dr. Matthias Stürmer

  • Institutsleiter
  • +41 31 848 41 68
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This project contributes to the following SDGs

  • 11: Sustainable cities and communities
  • 12: Responsible consumption and production
  • 13: Climate action

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