Slide deck for last week's workshop on sustainability and public procurement

As promised, you can find the (edited) slide deck for my workshop on sustainability in public procurement here. They have been edited to make a bit more sense by themselves and a I also took out a couple of slides pertaining to a work-in-progress from colleagues at CBS.

It went well despite me not having enough time to cover all that I wanted, but that is fine since the audience was very mixed and I felt the need to give a grounding on what public procurement rules are and how they work in broad strokes.

The essential of my view is that a broad stroke transition to mandatory sustainable procurement objectives is misguided and probably in breach of the principle of proportionality as well. These are ideas I will be exploring in more detail in the upcoming months.

The discussion with Miguel Raimundo was enlightening as always. We agree in a lot of things and he pushed back in some of my radical views. He also made a very good point about my description of the current status of green procurement as voluntary, stating in some instances it is not voluntary at all. He is indeed right and the reason why I referred to its current nature as voluntary is two fold: firstly, because how it is set in general in Directive 2014/24/EU; secondly, because that is the discourse of the green procurement maximalists, ie that it is not mandatory enough with the 'discourse is changing' in this regard. I simply decided to take my discussion to their field of battle.