New Project on Sustainable Public Procurement Kicks off

With its kick-off workshop on 25/26 January 2018, the new project “Municipalities Promoting and Shaping Sustainable Value Creation (MUPASS) – Public Procurement for Fair and Sustainable Production” officially started. Lead by the German Development Institute / Deutsches Institut für Entwicklungspolitik (DIE), implementation will take place in close cooperation with the Service Agency Communities in One World (SKEW) of Engagement Global and the Federal Ministry for Economic Co-Operation and Development (BMZ).

Corresponding to at least 10% to 20% of most countries’ GDP, public procurement has a huge potential leverage effect to make economic development more inclusive and ecologically sound if combined with respective requirements. A large part of those spendings is carried out by sub-national entities – hence MUPASS focusses on municipalities as main actors. Together with over 30 international experts on sustainable public procurement (SPP), the project team discussed options to refine the focus of the project’s three core elements: (1) identifying factors of successful SPP governance in Europe, Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa; (2) analyzing social effects of SPP procedures in selected supply chains; (3) organizing transformative city dialogues among stakeholders from the Global South and North on SPP.

The workshop participants gave precious input on all project elements and showed high interest in cooperating in the next project steps. What made the workshop a success was however not only the content input but particularly the enthusiasm for the topic and the project targets.