Future Perfect

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ustainable

agriculture

wildlife

food

security

consumption

and

production

patterns

to “promote public procurement policies that encour-

age development and diffusion of environmentally

sound goods and services”.

Public procurement has long been considered as one of

the key policies through which governments – as major

consumers – can demonstrate leadership and make a

major contribution to sustainable development by using

their purchasing power to drive markets towards the

supply of more environmentally and socially sustainable

products and services as well as to influence behaviour

of other socioeconomic actors by setting the example.

The European Commission, as well, has called on the

Member States to draw up publicly available action plans

for greening their public procurement

and proposed

that, by the year 2010, 50 per cent of all tendering proce-

dures should be green, whereby ‘green’ means compliant

with endorsed common ‘core’ GPP criteria.

Sustainable public procurement has been taken up in

the context of the two Sustainable Development Plans that

the Belgian Federal Government has endorsed to date. In

addition, a specific Federal Action Plan for Sustainable

Public Procurement (2009-2011), with a wide focus on

‘sustainable’ (rather than on ‘green’) public procurement,

entails an integrated approach of the three dimensions of

sustainable development.

This approach reflects the idea that public procure-

ment can also be used to encourage a variety of social

improvements: whether by guaranteeing good working

conditions for publicly contracted construction workers,

ensuring disabled access in public buildings, provid-

To address such problems, there is obviously a need for global solu-

tions. “Because significant impacts arise along supply chains through

globalized production systems, national actions need to be supple-

mented by global solutions”.

The adoption of a 10-year framework

of programmes on sustainable consumption and production patterns,

responding to the commitment of the WSSD, offers a way to integrate

this issue in a context of sustainable development at the global level in

cooperation with all relevant United Nations institutions.

But there is also a need for national responses. Several institutions

develop life cycle assessment tools of the social and environmental

impacts of products throughout their whole life cycle. The Belgian

Government took the opportunity of its Presidency of the Council of

the European Union in 2010 to promote such tools and in particu-

lar the social ones that are less developed than the environmental

ones, during a high-level EU event. A recent publication of the United

Nations Environment Programme, Guidelines for Social Life Cycle

Assessment of Products addresses the various social aspects that need

to be taken into account along the value chain.

Practical experience of sustainable public procurement

It its fourth chapter, which focuses on sustainable consumption and

production, Agenda 21 (1992) stipulates “governments themselves

also play a role in consumption, particularly in countries where

the public sector plays a large role in the economy, and can have

considerable influence on both corporate decisions and public

perceptions. They should therefore review the purchasing policies

of their agencies and departments so that they may improve, where

possible, the environmental content of government procurement

policies, without prejudice to international trade principles.

The

Johannesburg Plan of Implementation (2002; §19(c)), in turn, calls

Production patterns have a host of impacts, both on the environment and on human resources