Review of Green and Sustainable Public Procurement: Towards Circular Public Procurement

This paper provides a comprehensive literature review of preliminary publications on green and sustainable public procurement from the year 2000 until now. The aim of the review is to organise, evaluate and identify patterns and clusters in published articles, providing an overview of the state of the art in green and sustainable public procurement. Classification of the data identified three overall themes: organisational aspects, individual behaviour and operational tools, which comprise nine sub-categories: three organisational, two behavioural and four operational. The review shows how awareness and knowledge of circular public procurement attributes, based on circular policy and strategy implementation, are essential to conduct circular public procurement. The procurer’s beliefs and values are of high relevance in a transformation towards circular public procurement, simply not going for the lowest price, but finding an optimum combination that includes risk, timeliness and cost for the public institution on a life-cycle basis. Eco-labels, standards, life cycle assessments and life cycle costing are core parts of the process. Outlining the present knowledge as a foundation for future research in circular public procurement process development, this paper holds implications for both academics and procurement practitioners.