Sustainability requirements in EU public and private procurement – a right or an obligation?
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Procurement is no longer just about buying the cheapest possible supplies or services. Rather, it is understood as a process whereby organisations meet their needs in a way that achieves value for money on a lifetime basis and allows delivering aspects beyond savings, so-called sustainable procurement. This is true both for the public and private sectors. However, there is only limited legal regulation of sustainable procurement, which causes many uncertainties in respect to the possibility to include sustainability concerns into procurement processes as well as consequences of (not) doing so. The article thus focuses on the questions whether pursuing sustainability goals through procurement is an organisation's right or obligation and whether there are any risks of liability associated with pursuing or ignoring sustainability goals. These questions are analysed from the two perspectives of public and private procurement and similarities and differences between the sectors are identified. We find that in both sectors sustainability topics (i) are increasingly considered and implemented into contracts; (ii) deal with similar issues in both contexts; (iii) cover issues that are linked to the subject matter of a contract, including issues that relate rather to production process than the physical qualities of the delivered goods as such; and (iv) proliferate through all stages of the procurement process. However, the drivers of sustainability procurement and the legal regulation differ substantially. Still, it is found that while there is a right to include sustainability considerations into both public and private procurement processes, there are only contours of the legal obligation to do so. In respect to private procurement, the right to give considerations to sustainability issues is not expressly stated by the applicable law as it is in respect to public procurement (though limitations apply there as well). In fact, in both sectors the right mostly stems from the fact that there is no regulation forbidding this. Quite counter-intuitively then, there seem to be more legal risks associated with the inclusion of sustainability requirements into the procurement process (and inadequate enforcement thereof) rather than with ignoring them.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.081 | 0.003 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it