1 INTRODUCTION
The aim of this research is to understand the use of environmental criteria in public procurement practices, looking specifically at the municipal level in an effort to understand the gap between the aspirations set by the European commission for half of all public procurement in Europe to be green, and the actual adoption in practice. Europe 2020 strategy sees GPP as the key market instrument for achieving sustainability and eco-innovation across multiple policy spheres (EC, 2014b, p.1 in (Rainville, 2017). In fact, numerous working groups have created guides, set environmental criteria etc. in an effort to increase adoption of green procurement practices (European Commission, 2016). Given that in 2017, 19% of European GDP was accounted for by public expenditure, this is an area where significant gains can be made in integrating sustainability into national economies. National governments including France have made efforts to integrate the EU procurement laws into National Action Plans, with France creating an enabling legal context for the integration of environmental criteria in procurement decision-making. However, adoption remains elusive, particularly at the local level. This is in part because France has a relatively complex regulatory structure, particularly with regards to procurement and so there is a high degree of discretion for contracting authorities to make decisions on the awarding of contracts (PWC, 2016). This research is therefore an attempt at understanding decision-making by procurement officials at the level of individual practitioners in order to gain insights into opportunities and obstacles to the adoption of green procurement practices at the municipal level.
2 LITERATURE REVIEW
The following preliminary literature review highlights the major content-related pillars of the proposed research study: defining GPP and contextualising GPP research to date, understanding the extent of GPP formalisation at various levels, and finally, looking at approaches to understanding decision-making by public procurement practitioners.
Green Public Procurement: Research Trends
There is surprisingly little variance in how GPP is defined. Rainville (2017) for instance, defines GPP as the purchasing by public entities which reduces environmental impacts across product or service life cycles. However, a number of the reviewed literature (Testa et al., 2014) choose to adopt the definition offered by the European Commission: “a process whereby public authorities seek to procure goods and 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” (European Commission, 2008)
One of the key debates surrounding the definition of GPP has been whether the focus should be solely on the inclusion of environmental criteria, or whether a more differentiated understanding adds value. The proponents of the latter position argue for the adoption of sustainable public procurement (SPP), which considers other factors such as economic and social impact in procurement decisions. Ahi and Searcy (2013) note that the two terms are used interchangeably but that this risks creating methodological and theoretical confusion. However, since the definitions and a majority of the literature have to date focused on Green Public Procurement and that GPP guidance is more formalised than SPP, the proposed study will engage with this term. Another reason for selecting this definition is that the study is not necessarily trying to engage with the definitional understanding that public procurement practitioners have but rather their experience implementing it. Moreover, as the interviews will be conducted in French, these terminological differences are more for the communication of the research design and results.
Research on GPP has been carried out mostly in Europe with a significant number of case studies focusing on the UK, Denmark, Sweden and other Nordic countries, given their relatively high adoption of GPP in procurement practices. Different studies look at different classes of procured goods, with several looking at food procurement (Ahi and Searcy, 2013), others at construction (Uttam and Le Lann Roos, 2015).
Various conceptual frameworks have been developed in the literature to explain the (non)use of GPP in public procurement. The focus has often been on assessing and evaluating the effectiveness of specific implementation tools (Swanson et al. 2005; Walker and Brammer, 2009). For instance, a study done on behalf of the European Commission found that those countries that were most successful in integrating GPP usually had the following characteristics: (i) Strong political drivers, national guidelines and programmes for GPP; (ii) Public information resources via website and eco-labels; (iii) use of innovative tools like life-cycle thinking and green contract variants in procurement procedures; (iv) frequent implementation of environmental management systems by purchasing authorities (Steurer et al., 2007).
Level of analysis
A significant body of literature has identified cities as the leaders in greening public procurement and has looked at the obstacles and drawbacks that can negatively affect GPP uptake (Nogueira and Ramos, 2014; Walker and Brammer, 2009; Zhu et al., 2013). However, research done on European countries has often sourced its data on tenders from TED, the European e-procurement platform, where the minimum contract value is relatively high. Given that regional and municipal tender volumes are often significantly lower, it is possible that the analysis of tenders does not fully reflect procurement practices at the municipal level. In fact, of the literature reviewed for this preliminary analysis, a majority have been quantitively focused.
However, analysis of public procurement infrequently occurs from an individual decision-makers perspective. A study in Italy looks at the impact of training on the adoption of GPP (Testa et al., 2014), and a study in China looks at knowledge of regulations and GPP best-practice from other countries and its influence on GPP uptake by procurement practitioners (Zhu et al., 2013). However, trying to delve into the context of public procurement officers and how this impacts decision-making has not been the subject of much investigation. The theory of street-level bureaucracy proves a particularly promising theoretical lens to investigate this context, specifically the use of discretion by public procurement practitioners. However, to the writer’s knowledge, this has not yet been used as an analytical lens to shed light on the integration of GPP at the local level or at any other level of public procurement particularly as it relates to environmental innovation and sustainability transitions. However, this writer contends that particularly the sub-theories focusing on the existence and use of discretion in face of increasing bureaucratisation prove particularly relevant for the investigation into decision-making by front-line procurement officials. Further justification will be expanded on in the theoretical framework.
3 RESEARCH PROBLEM, OBJECTIVE AND QUESTION
Problem statement: We do not currently have a good understanding of how public procurement officers use discretion for greening procurement and the implications for the adoption of GPP at the municipal level.
Objective: The study will analyse discretion granted by existing laws and regulations for achieving sustainability in public procurement and understand the extent to which this discretion is used and in what ways through an investigation of factors that influence discretion developed by the theory of street-level bureaucracy.
Research question
1. What is the impact of the formalisation of GPP on discretion of public procurement practitioners at the municipal level?
2. How is discretion used by public procurement practitioners in the context of green procurement?
3. What conclusions can be drawn for the uptake of green public procurement practices at the municipal level?
4 THEORETICAL APPROACH
A number of research fields have attempted to shed light on the disparity between policy design and execution, each with a varying focus on different political and administrative levels. However, few of these research fields consider the often relatively high degrees of autonomy afforded to front-line public officials, in this context, public procurement practitioners. The theory of street level bureaucracy (SLB), first developed by Lipsky, addresses these front-line staff and the significant impact they have on the final shape of policy, not because of unwillingness and other negative traits associated to frontline bureaucrats, but rather, because “the routines they establish, and the devices they invent to cope with uncertainties and work pressures effectively become the public policies they carry out” (Lipsky, 2010: xiii). As such, the key methodological challenge for SLB is to ‘open the black box’ of what happens in implementation organisations (Hupe et al., 2015)
Lipsky defines street-level bureaucrats as the ‘public services with which citizens typically interact—including teachers, police officers and social workers in public agencies’ that have ‘direction in exercising authority’ (Lipsky, 2010: xvii). This emphasis on street-level bureaucrats serving as the interface for citizens to engage with government explains a focus on social welfare, police, teachers etc. in the literature. However, the theory has been used in other contexts such as foresters in Germany where the interaction with citizens is less clear cut (Maier and Winkel, 2017). This proposed study will adopt the definition of street-level bureaucrat developed by Arnold (2015) which broadens what is considered a street-level bureaucrat in order to reflect the specific context of public procurement practitioners. He argues that they do not spend a lot of time interacting with clients, which by contrast, the dominant definition of street-level bureaucrats implies. They also do not have any major managerial responsibilities. Like traditional street-level bureaucrats, they are described as ‘consumers of decisions made by top-level managers’ (Arnold, 2015; Westley, 1990: 388).
These bureaucrats share several key characteristics: they have relatively high degrees of discretion and relative autonomy from organisational authority. The key innovation of SLB is that it challenges the dichotomy between management control and street-level autonomy. For instance, the bureaucracy research programme regularly associates formalisation of practices through rules and guidance with a reduction in discretion.
However, Evans and Harris (2004) argue that it is more productive to think of there being different degrees of discretion rather than it being an all-or-nothing phenomenon. The degrees are shaped by the characteristics of the rules themselves. In fact, Lipsky writes of the relationship as a complex dialectic (Lipsky, 2010) while Davis’s formulation of discretion exists inside a donut, in that it occurs “whenever the effective limits on [a public official’s] power leave him free to make a choice among possible courses of action or inaction” (Davis, 1998: 4). As such he emphasises the importance of rules as the context and as an environment within which discretion exists. Hill (2003) too, argues that there is a complex and ever-present relationship between the rules that specify duties and obligations of public officials and the discretion of the latter which gives them freedom of action. The proposed study will adopt this understanding of the relationship between rules and discretion to understand the extent to which the actions of street-level bureaucrats are determined by rules and whether they enable or hinder the use of discretion. Once the degree of freedom prescriptively granted by rule-makers is estimated, the ways in which this freedom is actually used will be assessed.
Figure 1: Relationship between control and discretion (own design based on Davis (1971) formulation of discretion)
A significant body of research has investigated prominent factors influencing discretion both granted and used. Maier and Winkel (2017) find that the literature differentiates between five types of influences on discretion: (i) individual factors or characteristics such as street-level attitudes and knowledge; (ii) contextual factors such as contractual conditions, institutional arrangements; (iii) external actors who may provide practical knowledge and support to frontline officials; (iv) organisational factors such as resources, structures and values of the implementing agency, and (v) political factors that affect the complexity of policies to be implemented. In an investigation of discretion in a Swiss Public Unemployment Fund, Buffat identifies four types of factors that explain variation in the use of discretion by Fund officials (Hupe et al., 2015): (i) The type of task at hand (ii) the material economy of cases where cases with higher complexity demand greater use of discretion, (iii) rules and regulations which limit or favour the use of discretion and iv) control mechanisms and sanctions may encourage street-level bureaucrats to be risk averse in their use of discretion.
The theory of street-level bureaucracy and its treatment of discretion will inform the research study by structuring the two phases of the study. In the first phase, the rules and regulations will be mapped in order to understand and estimate discretion granted (see figure 1). The study assumes that the discretion granted is highly task dependent so public procurement activities will be categorised into different stages or groups, shaped by the analysis of challenges and obstacles to green procurement identified in the literature review on GPP. Once the procurement rules and regulations have been mapped in a way that sheds light on discretion granted, the second phase of the study will begin, seeking to understand factors that influence the actual use of discretion. The proposed research hopes to identify 4-5 prominent factors through a more extensive theoretical literature review and to identify hypotheses on the factors influencing the use of discretion by public procurement practitioners. In so doing, the study will seek to understand which factors are key to understanding discretion of public procurement practitioners.
5 METHODOLOGICAL DESIGN
The research questions guide the methodological choices used in this research. In order to answer these research questions, the research is divided into two phases:
1. Map the procurement process at the municipal level in France to locate stages of the process where discretion is possible for municipal public procurement practitioners. The framework developed for estimating discretion granted will be used to guide the document analysis.
2. Understand the context within which public procurement practitioners work in order to understand how that may have an effect on their decision-making/use of discretion. This means investigating whether, and to what extent the four factors identified in the theoretical framework play a significant role for the selected public procurement practitioners in how they use discretion.
Data Collection
The following is a list of methods for data collection used in this study in order to respond to the tasks outlined above.
Document analysis
This review will seek to extract detail on the influencing factors identified in the theoretical framework that serve to estimate the amount of discretion granted relative to the formalisation of GPP practices, namely through the regulatory framework and rules, as well as control mechanisms and accountability mechanisms. Once a conceptual framework for estimating discretion granted has been finalised that identifies key influencing categories, a review of policy documents, directives, regulations and other government documents as well as reports prepared by consultancies will be conducted in order to map out the procurement process in France, notorious for its complexity This will help to understand the extent to which GPP practices have been formalised and at what level. The insights gained in this section also play a key role in determining the substance of the interview guide.
Semi-structured Interviews
In order to gain insight into the context of public procurement practitioners and how they use discretion granted to integrate green procurement principles into their daily decision-making, semi-structured interviews will be conducted with 8-10 public procurement practitioners. The interview guide will be strongly informed by the convergence between the preliminary results of the document analysis and the factors identified in the theoretical framework.
The aim is to conduct face-to-face interviews with procurement officials. Initial contact will be made via email informing practitioners of the research via a Study Information Sheet and informing them that the interviews will be anonymised, and raw data will not be used by anyone beyond the scope of this research study. If face-to-face interviews are not possible, the interviews will be arranged through skype.
1.1. Sampling
The choice of public procurement practitioners to interview will be determined by the selection of cities. The following criteria have been used to select 25 municipalities with the hopes of achieving close to a 50 percent response rate.
2.1.1 City population size
The initial selection of cities will be based on population size. The cities will all be of ‘tailles intermediaires’, that is, cities of a size between 100,000 and 200,000 people. These municipalities are often considered to have their own socio-economic specificities (Nadou, 2010)
2.1.2 Geographical spread
All the municipalities selected will be in mainland France. The 25 selected cities cover all administrative regions and are all ‘communes’ in terms of administrative division.
Data Analysis
Once the interviews have been conducted, the data will be transcribed and analysed using qualitative content analysis via MaxQDA software. The text will be coded deductively based on the predetermined factors developed in the theoretical framework. Themes that are not foreseen but become visible through the analysis of data may be iteratively integrated into the analysis.