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To measure the number of countries implementing Sustainable Public Procurement (SPP) policies and action plan

The indicator measures the number of countries implementing Sustainable Public Procurement (SPP) policies and action plans, by assessing the degree of implementation through an index. To produce the index, countries self-assess the following main elements:

- Public procurement legal and regulatory framework

- Practical support delivered for the implementation of SPP

- SPP priority products and corresponding sustainable procurement criteria

- Existence of SPP monitoring system

- Measurement of actual SPP outcome.

Sustainable Development Unit

Sustainable Development Unit

Every two years

Is the number of countries implementing SPP policies and action plans.

Sustainable Public Procurement (SPP): Sustainable Public Procurement is a “A process whereby public organizations meet their needs for goods, services, works and utilities in a way that achieves value for money on a whole life cycle basis in terms of generating benefits not only to the organisation, but also to society and the economy, whilst significantly reducing negative impacts on the environment.” (Definition updated by the Multistakeholder Advisory Committee of the 10YFP SPP Programme)

Sustainable Public Procurement Action Plan: A Sustainable Public Procurement (SPP) action plan is a policy document articulating the priorities and actions a public authority will adopt to support the implementation of SPP.

Plans usually/should address the economic, environmental and social dimensions of SPP, and recognise the potential for SPP to realise SDGs”. In some cases a country’s action plan may focus on a single aspect of sustainability, being either environmental (e.g. “Green” public procurement action plan), social (e.g. reference to human rights, fair trade, focus on employment of minorities, etc.), or economic (e.g. promotion of SMEs’ participation in tenders, focus on employment of minorities, etc.).

Best Value for Money: can be defined as the “optimum combination of whole-life cost and quality to meet the end-user's requirements".

Life-cycle costing (LCC):  is used to evaluate costs which may not be reflected in the purchase price of a product, work or service, and which will be incurred during their lifetime.

MEAT: The Most Economically Advantageous Tender criterion enables the contracting authority to take account of criteria that reflect qualitative, technical and sustainable aspects of the tender submission as well as price when reaching an award decision.

More reference about the above and their contextualization can be found in the document attached “SPP Index methodology”.

Administrative level of the public procurement: national, provincial, or local.

Note: Information has been received at those three levels in the first data collection exercise, but only in rare occasions. Data can be provided separately by administrative level (whenever data was received from subnational governments) for some provincial or local governments only.

Level 0: Insufficient data or insufficient implementation of SPP policy/ action plan (SPP Implementation Score below 1), therefore not complying with the expected set level of implementation.

Level 1: Initiation of SPP implementation (SPP Implementation Score ranging from 1 to 2).

Level 2: Lower-intermediate implementation (SPP Implementation Score ranging from 2 to 3).

Level 3: Upper-intermediate implementation (SPP Implementation Score ranging from 3 to 4).

Level 4: Advanced implementation (SPP Implementation Score larger than 4).

Data on the proportion of sustainable public procurement are not available because there is no agreement on which products are green or sustainable and because data are very often not classified in terms of volumes and value of purchased products. Another limitation is related to the existence of multiple layers and components of public procurement: central government, provinces in federal countries, municipal level, public enterprises, hospitals, defence, etc. Procurement data from these different sectors are very often not aggregated. In addition, contracts below a certain threshold are not monitored.

All the metadata shown in this document was gathered from United Nation Statistics Division. The metadata was extracted from https://unstats.un.org/sdgs/metadata/.