In one of the posts on this blog, Mr. Vinay Sharma, Director, African
Development Bank wrote, “I also believe that while environmental sustainability has
adequately been spoken about when discussing procurement, the issue of social
sustainability still requires to be more comprehensively discussed.” This is indeed an experienced observation and I completely
agree with him. I heard a resonance of the same idea when I was attending a workshop
on Credibility Principles
for Voluntary Sustainability Standards recently, organized by Iseal Alliance, an umbrella body for sustainability standards. One of the
participants from Social Accountability International (SAI) raised a similar
question – why stakeholders are not talking about integrating social standards
in public procurement while discussing sustainable procurement? The speaker, I
observed, was least prepared for this question. She,
after lot of thoughts and internal processing, explained that it is probably because
of difficulty in applying it in procurement process. The discussion continued
but the question persisted.
The
very idea of integrating environmental and social concerns in public buying is
to look not just at the economic upfront cost of product and service but also
look at the product and service in its entirety and ask a more wider question:
does public buying provide best value for money over a product’s life cycle?
When we discuss only environmental sustainability in public procurement we are obviously
focusing only on two pillars of sustainable development. A basic understanding of geometry tells us
that three-legged structures are more stable than two-legged ones! In the same
way, we just cannot hope for sustainable development without integrating social
concerns in decision-making process. Governments around the world have a lot to
do on appreciating equality and diversity;
observing core labour standards; ensuring fair working conditions; increasing
employment and skills; and, developing local communities. Governments, often,
seem unable to ensure these in practice despite existence of laws on paper. In
fact, government’s attempts to ensure social compliance through legislations,
has not yielded much result on ground. The government cannot withdraw from its
stated objective of working for societal growth.
But what I found baffling
is that this situation is not unique to developing countries where awareness
about sustainability in low and penetration of sustainable public procurement
(SPP) is negligible. Even European countries, which pioneered public
procurement as a tool to promote sustainable development, have all along been
focusing only on environmental issues. They, somehow, dropped/missed the word
‘social’ from sustainability pyramid and have used ‘green’ interchangeably with
‘sustainable’. The European Parliament’s directive 2004/17/EC of 2004, legal
framework for GPP in European Countries, has clarified how public purchasers
can include environmental considerations in their procurement processes and
procedures. This answers why EU talks about green procurement rather than
sustainable procurement. I was looking at EU GPP criteria for products and
services on their website but did not find mention of any social criteria such
as rights of workers, minimum living wages, non-discrimination etc. However, I
did take a note of ‘training of workers’ mentioned in case of procurement of
services. I have no clue as to why other
social criteria are none of their concern!
(TO BE CONTINUED IN NEXT POST....)
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