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1 Introduction

On the World Environment Day on June 5, 2007, the United Nations Secretary-General made a pledge “[…] to explore ways of making the United Nations (UN) more climate friendly and environmentally sustainable, and to develop a climate neutral approach to its premises and operations.” This pledge positioned sustainability as an overarching goal for the entire UN system, and kicked off a process of acknowledgement, commitment, and implementation of sustainable practices across its various agencies, funds and programs. Procurement in the United Nations is no exception to this trend, and policymakers have been exploring different ways of integrating sustainability into procurement practices.

With a total procurement volume of $14.3 billion (in 2011), the UN holds significant purchasing power that substantially influences the markets in which its entities participate. Sustainable procurement (SP) presents a formidable opportunity for the UN to influence both its associated organizations and projects towards practices that favor the environment, social progress, and economic development while optimizing costs. The purpose of this paper will be to assess to what extent the UN is implementing sustainable procurement. This presents us with the following research question:

What are the main barriers to implementing sustainable procurement in the UN system?

The paper is organized as follows: first, we briefly discuss how sustainable procurement has been treated in the UN in the recent past and present an official UN definition. Second, we conduct a short literature review in order to cover the state of the art. This is followed by a section on methodology and research approach. Namely, we are proposing to conduct a series of in-depth interviews with UN procurement professionals in various organizations in order to discover the most pertinent barriers to sustainable procurement implementation they experience in their daily work. In the analysis and discussion section we present our findings and discuss the implications. A conclusion wraps up the study.

2 Sustainable Procurement in the UN

2.1 History of Sustainable Procurement in the UN

Following the Secretary General’s pledge to a sustainable UN in 2007, numerous initiatives took place to establish a fledgling policy framework for sustainable procurement. A Sustainable UN (SUN) unit was created in the UN Environment Program (UNEP) to coordinate the sustainability performance of the agencies. Also, an Interagency Working Group on Sustainability Management was formed to track greenhouse gas emissions and report to the Environment Management Group (EMG), a UN system-wide coordination body hosted by UNEP. Two reports from UN internal oversight bodies in 2009 and 2010 highlighted the need to involve the procurement function in the efforts towards sustainability. In one effort to meet this call, the United Nations Office for Project Services (UNOPS), UNEP, the International Labor Organization (ILO) and the International Training Center of ILO (ITC ILO) published a manual in 2011 on sustainable procurement for managers and practitioners titled “Buying for a Better World.”

2.2 Definition of Sustainable Procurement

UN organizations have endeavored to reach an agreed definition of sustainable procurement aligned to their priorities. As defined by the High Level Committee on Management Procurement Network (HLCM PN), “Sustainable Procurement integrates requirements, specifications and criteria that are compatible and in favor of the protection of the environment, of social progress and in support of economic development, namely by seeking resource efficiency, improving the quality of products and services and ultimately optimizing costs” (HLCM-PN 2009). Sustainable Procurement thus considers economic, social and environmental factors (Elkington 1997), and it entails looking beyond initial purchase price and short-term costs to realize the long-term value, both for the organization and society in general. Various techniques, such as whole-life costing, life-cycle assessment, or the incorporation of sustainability criteria into solicitation documents, make it possible for procurement practitioners to balance the need to effectively meet organizational goals while contributing to sustainable supply chains more generally.

2.3 Current Status of Sustainable Procurement in the UN

In spite of the streamlining of the sustainability concept across the higher echelons of the UN, it is currently unclear to what extent procurers are expected to adopt SP practices. While the UN is committed to sustainability in general and sustainable development in particular, the acceptance of sustainable procurement has not been without its controversies (Lund-Thomsen and Costa 2011). The General Assembly (GA) has still not officially endorsed SP. SP was intensely debated in the Fifth Committee of the General Assembly in 2009, and a typical North-South divide seemed to emerge in the proceedings. While the European Union (EU) argued for SP in order to raise awareness and discover best-fit solutions, the Group of 77 (G77, the largest intergovernmental grouping of developing countries), opposed the concept of SP due to concerns that suppliers in their countries would not be treated according to the principles of equal, fair, and non-discriminatory sourcing. Furthermore, the G77 were not convinced of the need to implement SP as they felt they had not been provided with sufficient details on how suppliers and international competition would be affected. A final decision was reached to postpone the decision on official endorsement of SP.

In this environment of increasing prioritization of sustainable procurement in the UN, but also significant obstacles to its widespread adoption, it thus makes sense to have an in-depth look at the current state of SP and to gauge the most pertinent barriers to its effective implementation. This is the purpose of this paper, and its aspiration is to initiate research on the issue and construct a rudimentary framework of barriers which should be of interest to policymakers, practitioners and researchers involved in sustainable public procurement.

3 Literature Review

Sustainable procurement is a field that has been gaining increasing interest from practitioners and academics alike in the past few years. In this article, we treat the term ‘sustainable procurement’ as encompassing the various related terms such as sustainable supply management, sustainable purchasing, or purchasing and supply management sustainability. Walker (2012) carried out an analysis of 35 journals which showed more than a doubling in the number of articles published on sustainable procurement from 2009 to 2010 (from circa 40 articles to more than 100). Similar spikes from 2010 onwards can be found in the number of special issues published on sustainable procurement and the number of papers presented at IPSERA conferences (International Purchasing and Supply Education and Research Association) on the subject (Walker et al. 2012). Being a recent phenomenon, there is still a relative dearth of literature on the subject, in spite of the growing interest. This leaves investigators with a number of methodological challenges and research gaps.

The literature on corporate social responsibility (CSR) has provided practitioners and academics in the procurement field with the useful tool of the Triple Bottom Line (TBL), whereby one measures not only economic performance, but also social and environmental (Elkington 1997). The TBL advocates an integration of all three factors, but research in sustainable procurement has tended to favor environmental matters by a magnitude of 2–1 (Walker et al. 2012). Also, researchers have been insufficiently explicit about their level of analytic focus. Sustainable procurement studies span several levels: individual, organizational, buyer-supplier dyads, supply chain/networks, and market/society/stakeholders. In order to further the conceptual clarity of the field, it is important to consider which dimensions of the TBL are being addressed as well as the level of analytic focus on which you are working (Hoejmose and Adrien-Kirby 2012).

There are numerous studies on SP in the private sector in industrialized countries (Pagell and Wu 2009, 2011; Pagell et al. 2010; Giunipero et al. 2012). The Supply Chain Management (SCM) literature has traditionally linked sustainable sourcing to corporate social responsibility initiatives (Carter and Jennings 2004), although several recent studies focus on the use and diffusion of environmental practices by suppliers (Tate et al. 2011, 2013) and the link between environmental and social practices and performance (Pullman et al. 2009). Barriers and enablers to the inclusion of sustainability in the private organizations’ supply chain have been extensively analyzed in literature (Walker and Jones 2012; Giunipero et al. 2012). However, this body of research is not yet endorsing the holistic Triple Bottom Line view of SP, and it is unconcerned with SP in public organizations (Tate et al. 2012). There are several other reasons one can assume private sector SP barriers to be less applicable to a public sector context. The legal and economic environment constraining firms is markedly different from the one constraining public sector organizations in general. Furthermore, the UN’s political environment is unmatched in terms of scale and complexity.

Sustainable public procurement, meanwhile, is best covered in the developed world (Brammer and Walker 2011, 2012; Preuss and Walker 2011; Walker et al. 2008), and especially on the scale of local government (Meehan and Bryde 2011; Nijaki and Worrel 2012; Preuss 2009; Thomson and Jackson 2007). Several recent studies are looking into the various issues that crop up when extending sustainable supply chains into the developing world (Hall and Matos 2010; Muller et al. 2012; Boons et al. 2012). Sustainable public procurement in developing countries is the most significant research gap (Walker et al. 2012; Vermeulen and Seuring 2009), and SP in the United Nations seems almost completely unstudied (Lund-Thomsen and Costa 2011; Walker and Harland 2008). Our contribution thus addresses a gap both in terms of SP in a developing country, public sector context and in terms of UN procurement. Due to the specificity of the UN’s context and the unstudied current situation, it is clear that an inductive approach to determining the main barriers is required.

4 Methodology

4.1 Grounded Theory

Our research design is inspired by the Grounded Theory (GT) approach, while not following its tenets to the letter (Glaser and Strauss 1967). This methodological approach has been chosen because there is little previous research on the chosen field of study. Specifically, we encounter limitations in adapting some of the existing theoretical frameworks developed in the literature on barriers to SP and sustainable SCM in the private sector to UN procurement. This is mainly due to its structural complexity and to the politically charged decisional process (Walker and Harland 2008). Furthermore and as previously discussed in our literature review, this study seems to be placed at the crossroad of some overlapping research gaps: those on UN procurement, on SP in developing countries and on SP in the UN specifically. This warrants the use of the Grounded Theory inductive research process for theory development.

Grounded Theory is a methodology that aims at the generation and discovery of theory through the analysis of (typically) qualitative data, and is therefore well suited to exploratory studies (Stebbins 2001). One of the tenets of GT is to avoid pre-existing conceptualizations of the studied field, which means that the analyst should refrain from doing excessive literature review and building hypotheses. Instead, analytic codes and categories should develop through inductive reasoning, drawing on the data gathered from e.g. interviews. This ensures that the analyst minimizes the impact that his bias or preconceptions may have on the research, thus ‘grounding’ the theory in reality.

Central to the Grounded Theory approach is the idea of constant comparison, which posits that data collection and analysis should be carried out concurrently (Glaser and Strauss 1967). The most common data collection method is in-depth interviews (Berg and Lune 2011). However, another tenet, ‘all is data,’ states that the researcher need not constrain his analysis to only treating the collected interview data. The existing literature can also be used as data and be constantly compared to the codes and categories emerging from the analysis. The same applies for hypotheses; they can be considered as data collected from the researchers instead of analytical constructs to be verified or falsified. Therefore, literature reviews and hypotheses are useful and allowed as long as categories are not made to fit the literature. Rather, hypotheses and the extant literature should inform the analysis, but not direct it.

Data collection usually follows the idea of theoretical sampling, which entails letting the unfolding analysis inform the data collection process. In other words, instead of choosing interview subjects at random, the researcher should selectively target subjects that maximize the potential to discover relevant, new data (Corbin and Strauss 2007). As data becomes collected, it should be subjected to analysis immediately. Rather than spend time recording and transcribing interviews, GT urges the analyst to field-note interviews and quickly consider how the information gathered from the interview subject develops the theoretical picture of the studied field. This is typically done by coding the general notes taken during the interview, i.e. identify different codes (such as words, phrases, ideas) that allow the key points to be gathered and then extracting from these codes more general concepts that capture different collections of codes. From these concepts, categories (higher-order constructs) may be built in order to arrive, ultimately, at a more condensed theoretical overview of the key factors that explain the observed social behavior. Grounded Theory thus aims at theory generation, but for the purposes of our study, it makes sense to use it in order to arrive at a framework of barriers to sustainable procurement that is grounded in the daily experiences of UN officials. GT has been used extensively in the SCM literature (Denk et al. 2012).

4.2 Data Collection

Table 5.1 presents the UN entities we interviewed for the study, as well as their procurement volume. Added together, they make up more than 92 % of the UN system’s total procurement volume (roughly $13.2 billion of $14.3 billion). We targeted the largest procuring entities and added three more organizations which we identified as sustainability leaders in the UN system (the bottom three organizations in the table: UNEP, ILO, and the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA)). These are the agencies that have been highly involved in formulating sustainability policies, raising sustainability awareness, or working on cross-cutting sustainability initiatives.

Table 5.1 UN entities targeted for the study
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At each agency we approached a procurement policymaker and procurement practitioner for interviews. This decision was taken on the basis of the realization that sustainable procurement is carried out both on a policy level and a practitioner level (Preuss 2009; Thomson and Jackson 2007). The policy level has to do with setting the strategic direction, formulating policy, and setting strategic priorities, while the practitioner level involves carrying out actual procurement transactions. Hence, procurement practitioners are those professionals that work on carrying out actual procurement transactions in their respective organizations. Ideally, they are the people who are already doing sustainable procurement in their daily work. In the policymaker group we find senior level professionals and directors who are responsible for incorporating sustainable procurement into the daily work of their organizational units. By splitting the interview subjects into the distinct groups of practitioners and policymakers, our study focuses on providing a holistic picture of SP in the UN, including how it functions both strategically and practically as understood at various levels in the organizations. This approach, informed both by personal experience and the literature, directed our theoretical sampling strategy for the data collection (Corbin and Strauss 2007).

The interview subjects were identified by drawing on the professional networks of the researchers, and referrals were used when gaps occurred. This provided us with 22 research subjects in total, and 11 in each of the groups (practitioners and policymakers). We consider this sample representative of the community involved in sustainable procurement in the largest procuring UN entities, on the basis of our practitioners’ knowledge and of the outreach done within the organizations to identify the research subjects. Furthermore, the interview process confirmed that we were reaching the saturation of the research topic. At the time the research was carried out, all the authors of this paper were employed in the procurement division of UNOPS, the organization with the mandate to be a central procurement resource in the UN system. Furthermore, the authors were heavily engaged on sustainable procurement matters in the UN and active in cross-organizational working groups and harmonization initiatives. This positioned us uniquely well in order to affirm that the interview subjects we targeted were indeed authorities on the matter in their organizations. We emphasize that the 22 identified interviewees were not a random sample of procurement staff, but were indeed the specific staff that were charged with SP tasks in their organizations. The practitioners we targeted generally held the title of Procurement Officer, while the policymakers were either senior level procurement managers or SP subject matter experts.

An interview manual was followed so that each interviewee was asked the same set of questions (as a starting point), and notes were taken on each response. Interview subjects were asked for their personal opinions instead of official, organizational stances. For this reason, it was also advantageous to refrain from recording the interviews, so that interviewees were more at ease and could speak more freely (Berg and Lune 2011). The interviews proceeded as outlined in the interview manual in the appendix. During the interviews, the researchers took notes on the responses of the subjects in a standard document that mirrored the contents of the interview manual.

5 Analysis

Of the twenty-two interviews that we were aiming for, twenty interviews in all were carried out. We succeeded in getting at least one interview subject from each of the eleven organizations, meaning that the two remaining interviews stem from two different organizations where we only interviewed one person. In both of these cases we spoke to policymakers, making them slightly overrepresented in the study. The use of a standard document for recording responses of subjects on each interview item allowed for ease of comparison across interview subjects. These interview notes made up the data that the researchers coded according to the Grounded Theory approach. After each interview, the notes were coded and analyzed in order to determine which barriers to sustainable procurement each respondent brought forward. Once all the interviews had been carried out, the interview notes were revisited and re-coded by the researchers several times to arrive at a condensed and consistent framework of barriers.

5.1 Barrier Framework

When the final framework of barriers was decided upon, all interview data was analyzed once more to ensure that the number of times each barrier was cited by interview subjects was correct. Our findings are summarized in Table 5.2, showing the categories of barriers, the individual barriers, the number of times cited by policymakers and practitioners and the number of times cited in total. The final column provides an overview of the barriers and of how many times they were cited by respondents—the lowest frequency being 2 times and the highest 13. Within this range, we focused our analysis on the categories with a citation frequency on the upper half of the range (8–13 citations). Eight categories that encompass all the individual barriers emerged from the analysis: information, tools, policy/strategy, performance measurement, mandate/politics, supply, demand, and resources. In the following sections we will touch upon interesting individual barriers in turn.

Table 5.2 Barrier framework
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5.2 Most Cited Barriers

The lack of an organizational sustainable procurement policy was found to be the most frequently cited barrier (13 of 20 interview subjects). Subjects argued that without a high-level policy or strategy in place to deal with SP, no initiatives would be taken towards implementation. Furthermore, those initiatives that were taken without a solid policy in place often encountered problems such as a lack of staff or funds because these resources could not be granted to sustainability initiatives without the legitimacy accorded by their incorporation into the organization’s formal policy or strategy. In this way, many of the different types of barriers in fact had the lack of a SP policy as their root cause. The same argument explains why the lack of a political mandate was such a frequently cited issue. UN organizations largely depend on member state funding, and thus their operations are determined by the specific mandate they are given in the General Assembly (Lund-Thomsen and Costa 2011). Devoting large amounts of time or effort to realizing sustainability efforts is, thus, believed to be unrealistic without securing the political go-ahead.

The barriers presented by dealing with short-term cost increases and the need to update procurement procedures are likewise connected. The core issue with these two barriers is the difficulty of balancing short-term costs and long-term savings, but several factors explain why this is very difficult for UN agencies. Often, sustainable procurement solutions require higher up-front costs, which can be recuperated over time. However, UN agencies typically receive core budget funding from member states, i.e. a lump sum of money that they have to put to best possible use. Under such circumstances, it is difficult to justify spending more money than allotted for the procurement of sustainable solutions, because the long-term savings do not figure into any envisioned business plans or budgetary cycles. Additionally, the procuring entities and the implementing partners are typically separately budgeted, so that once the handover of goods has occurred, the long-term costs and savings will only fall on the implementing partner, prompting procurers to seek the lowest initial costs in these cases.

The issue of market barriers in program countries is cited 10 times. UN agencies typically operate in the developing parts of the world, and when sourcing from local markets, sustainable solutions are often nonexistent or prohibitively challenging. When half of the interview subjects are of the opinion that this constitutes a barrier to SP, this finding lends credence to the appeal by developing countries in the GA that sustainability criteria in UN procurement risks cutting off a significant share of their suppliers. These markets may have to mature further, or SP initiatives have to meet these challenges more directly and assist suppliers in meeting sustainability requirements (Ehrgott et al. 2013).

On the lower end of the range of important barriers we find barriers cited by 8–9 of the interview subjects. Since they are important issues, they warrant a short consideration here. Concrete information and tool needs, such as definitions of sustainability criteria and updated procurement manuals, are holding several interview subjects back. The fact that these issues are mentioned less than the policy and mandate barriers suggests that SP implementation has not progressed to the point that these issues are making themselves more felt. It can be deduced that had the policy and mandate barriers been cleared, more agencies would be looking at the first steps of implementation (information and tools), and perhaps these issues would have been more cited in that case. They are significant barriers for those agencies working with SP already, but non-issues for those who feel blocked already at the policy and mandate level. Thus, this indicates a sequence of SP implementation, a series of steps to be taken in order, which we will explore further in the discussion.

The policy barrier in this section (“Policies focused on cost effectiveness”) represents the issue that an agency’s policies guiding procurement prioritize cost effectiveness and financial goals, and do not incorporate social and environmental considerations. This barrier is connected to “Dealing with short-term cost increases” and “Procurement procedures need updating,” but reflect the issue at a policy level instead of the resource level (cost increases) or tool level (procedures). If the organization reports on its effectiveness to stakeholders in terms of financials, these measures would currently not take social and environmental factors into account. This results in policy that leads procurement staff to seek cost effectiveness above all else. The supply side issue in this category is also akin to the one reported in the previous table, but rather than representing the issues with sourcing in program areas, this barrier represents the risk that the global supply base may become too limited by the incorporation of sustainability criteria.

6 Discussion

In general, we find that the status of sustainable procurement in the UN has progressed significantly since this issue was last researched five years ago (Lund-Thomsen and Costa 2011). At that time, SP was a very new concept in the UN, and the majority of agencies that were contacted had a very tenuous grasp of the concept and often no immediate plans to implement SP in their organizations. That picture differs considerably from what we discovered this time around. All interview subjects provided a definition of the concept, expressed a keen interest in the subject, and talked about recent and future plans and examples of SP. Although implementation has by no means progressed very far yet, it would be fair to say that the issue has gained a lot of traction in the UN.

6.1 An SP Implementation Model

Looking at the framework as a whole, it is evident that the core issue preventing further implementation of SP in the UN is a need to formalize the requirement for sustainable procurement in the agencies, both in the form of a political mandate and an organizational strategy and SP policy. UN entities are public sector, rule-bound organizations that have to demonstrate accountability to member states while also appearing responsible towards stakeholders in general (Brammer and Walker 2011). This sometimes becomes a difficult balancing act, as in the case of sustainable procurement (Lund-Thomsen and Costa 2011). On the one hand, the UN has to show leadership in sustainability and signal this to the market. They have to pursue sustainability to display social and environmental responsibility and appear legitimate to stakeholders such as the general public (Walker et al. 2008). On the other hand, the UN spends public money and therefore must be accountable to member states. This accountability is derived from the formal mandates accorded to the agencies through General Assembly resolutions, and as stated, there has been no formal endorsement of sustainable procurement at this level as of yet. UN agencies are thus caught between the demands of satisfying stakeholders by appearing sustainable and satisfying member states by being thrifty. Sometimes you can be thrifty and sustainable simultaneously, and sometimes sustainability carries a premium. This short explanation accounts for the haphazard and ad hoc implementation of SP currently. Agencies are picking the low-hanging fruits, i.e. doing SP when it is easy and cheap.

This is a natural way to go about SP implementation, but to progress beyond the easy wins and take on more ambitious and long-term sustainability, the formalized requirement for SP (mandate and strategy/policy) has to be secured. The notion that SP implementation progresses through several steps in sequence, i.e. that you must have the mandate, then policy, then manuals and tools, etc., has led us to propose the following model to explain SP implementation in public organizations (Fig. 5.1).

Fig. 5.1
figure 1

Sequential implementation model

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The model mirrors the categories that emerged in the barrier framework from the Grounded Theory analysis. The respective relationships between the categories in the framework we posit on the basis of evidence from the interviews (see also the practical example in the next section). What the model entails is that higher-order issues must be resolved before the lower ones can be taken on effectively. For instance, training staff in SP makes little sense before securing the political mandate to do SP and institutionalizing this mandate in the organization’s strategies and policies. What we have seen in the UN agencies and SP-connected working groups and networks to date is an appetite and ambition to address these issues, but little recognition of the sequential implementation process, or plans to tackle the higher-order barriers. The focus has been on developing training programs, manuals, and guidelines, and while these things are necessary, their impact will be limited before clearing higher-order barriers. Organizational resources that are devoted exclusively to furthering SP should be provided as soon as SP is formalized into policy and strategy at the level of the individual organization, and the resources must be secured for the duration of the implementation process and subsequent operational stage. While most of the categories describe internal organizational processes, the categories of supply and demand capture the effects of external actors as well.

This brings us to the most pertinent implication of our research: where should the UN direct its focus in order to progress on SP implementation? The five most cited barriers represent two core issues, and they respectively represent different manifestations of these two issues. The first issue can be summarized thus: market barriers to suppliers in program (developing) countries are the reason that the political mandate has not been given by the GA, which prevents many UN agencies from legitimizing the practice of SP by incorporating it into formal organizational strategy and policy. To address this issue, the focus should be on how to tear down these market barriers to SP in the developing world. Accomplishing this successfully should lead the way towards GA endorsement, by making sustainability requirements uncontroversial. Different strategies can be envisioned towards this end: first, UN agencies are already making efforts towards upgrading local suppliers through their program activities. These efforts can be up-scaled and more focused on meeting sustainability requirements (Ehrgott et al. 2013). Second, efforts must be made to analyze and communicate the business case for SP in UN operations (Tate et al. 2013). Widely held beliefs state that SP entails paying a premium in order to ‘do good,’ and many interview subjects voiced this exact concern. SP, when done correctly, ought to bring about long-term savings, and it is important to convince stakeholders that SP is best management practice and not philanthropy.

The other issue relates to the procedures and resource needs that guide and constrain procurement in the UN, and also touches upon the notion of realizing long-term economic savings. As previously mentioned, procurement procedures in the UN are generally not well-equipped to balance the higher initial investments with long-term savings that you often find in cases of sustainable procurement. For private sector companies this is an easier exercise, because by presenting a compelling business case to banks or investors, higher initial investments can be merited. When relying on donor funding, there are limited possibilities for acting on long-term propositions. The culture of accountability in the UN presently dictates a demonstration of short-term cost effectiveness. Currently, donors need to be convinced that their money is put to good use, and results and impacts should be quickly achieved and measurable. One idea to address these issues includes revisiting the agencies’ budgetary cycles and reporting requirements to allow for better representation of long-term savings.

6.2 Practical Example: UNFPA and Sustainable Procurement of Male Condoms

In the following practical case example, we highlight and demonstrate the issues brought forward in the discussion. The data in this section stems from the two interviews carried out with UNFPA, and explicit permission has been granted to discuss this particular case in the study, since it serves as an integrative example that provides some empirical basis for several of the barriers.

At the time of writing, UNFPA were in the process of developing their ‘green procurement’ strategy with the help of external consultants. The basis for developing this strategy originated in recent experiences in carrying out actual SP transactions. Earlier in 2013, UNFPA issued a solicitation for a Long Term Agreement (LTA) on the supply of male condoms. What was interesting about this solicitation was that it was the first instance of including environmental requirements into solicitation documents in UNFPA. Bidders were asked whether they lived up to requirements such as an ISO14001 certification, whether they complied with local laws governing air and wastewater pollution, to document a long-term plan for saving energy and using renewable energy, and to progressively introduce more recycled and biodegradable materials and sustainability certifications for their packaging materials over the next few years.

The move towards including environmental requirements in condom solicitations had been discussed with suppliers over a multi-year period. UNFPA has been active in the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) in the development of a standard for environmentally friendly produced condoms. Through this forum, existing suppliers had gradually been sensitized to a market shift. When development began three years ago, very few of the suppliers showed any willingness or interest in this new standard, but in a recent vote over 50 % of the suppliers voted for the establishment of the standard. This fact shows the importance of sensitizing suppliers early to a shifting market. The introduction of sustainability criteria will be more successful if an incremental approach is taken, with ample warning given.

On this particular LTA, UNFPA did not experience a reduction in the supply base, which was comprised almost entirely of bidders from developing countries and economies in transition. An expected number of bidders submitted, and their sustainability measures were better than expected, although spanning the range from full compliance to none. The evaluation of the bids made another issue apparent. For those requirements that were easily measurable, such as whether or not the supplier had attained ISO14001 certification, compliance was easy to demonstrate and believable. However, on the requirements that were more loosely defined, such as documenting a long-term energy saving plan, bidders demonstrated compliance in a variety of different ways such as loose promises, energy saving projects and plans for monitoring factory processes. Furthermore, some of the requirements were very well-defined and concrete, but in reality they would be very difficult to measure compliance on. For example, the requirement for recyclable materials gradually increases from 20 % in 2014 to 40 % in 2016. At the time of the solicitation, suppliers could do no more than promise to live up to this in the future. With no plans from UNFPA to audit suppliers on their performance on these requirements, this promise is also rather easy to make.

These difficulties, surmountable as they may be, gloss over a more conspicuous absence. None of the environmental requirements have any actual bearing on the evaluation of the bids. In other words, suppliers’ performance on these requirements did not figure into the final scores. Rather, the environmental requirements were offered as optional requirements. Suppliers knew they were going above the minimum by reporting performance here, and yet the majority of suppliers made an effort to demonstrate compliance regardless. Rather than making the entire exercise pointless however, the inclusion of environmental requirements served a distinct and very important purpose: that of signaling changing preferences to the market. Through the LTA, UNFPA can effectively communicate that these types of requirements are going to become more common. Thus, the LTA should be regarded as an extension of the process of sensitization that started already three years ago when first discussing environmental requirements with suppliers through the ISO.

However, the case also serves as an illustration of the barriers that arise when working in contradiction to the sequential model we proposed earlier. The green procurement exercise was a bottom-up initiative that originated in the procuring unit. Although tolerated, and perhaps encouraged, by senior management in the organization, no SP policy or strategy existed at the time of the solicitation. Thus, UNFPA were unable to score the environmental requirements on the bids as a part of the technical evaluation, as doing so would be in violation of organizational rules and procurement procedures. Using solicitations to communicate an increasing appetite for sustainability will only be believable if they are followed up by binding or mandatory requirements in the future. UNFPA will have to ensure that a policy is in place in the near future to allow for this, and this is exactly what the agency is working on through the development of its ‘green procurement strategy.’ However, a less risky approach to this would have been to carry out these actions in the sequence we propose—first ensuring the policy, then signaling, then including binding requirements. This approach ensures that the signals that are sent will correspond with forthcoming requirements.

A final note on the case concerns the lack of any criteria related to social factors in the solicitation. Social factors are covered in the General Terms and Conditions that suppliers have to sign and live up to in order to become vendors to the UN. However, sustainable procurement dictates the inclusion of social criteria in the procurement process itself, and not only in preliminary contracts. The lack of a formal UN-wide definition and endorsement by the GA risks fracturing the approaches taken to SP by the different agencies, which could confuse suppliers and forego opportunities for the UN to achieve synergies in the procurement process.

7 Conclusion

7.1 Strengths and Limitations of the Study

In general, we concluded that sustainable procurement implementation is in the early stages in the UN, but the issue has gained much traction in recent years. The most significant barriers have to do with a need for a formal endorsement of SP on a UN-wide level, a need to institutionalize this mandate in the agencies’ strategic plans and procurement policies, and a need to revisit procurement procedures to better allow for balancing short-term and long-term expenditures. Our focus on providing a holistic view of both SP policy and practice resulted in the conception of a sequential model of SP implementation. We propose that implementation of SP in political organizations has to progress through a series of steps, beginning with mandate and ending with concrete tools, in order to be effective. In our literature review, we have highlighted the existing gap in our understanding of how SP is applied not only in the UN but more in general in public organizations operating in developing countries. Our sequential implementation model serves as a blueprint for identifying causal links between general categories of barriers, and consequently proposing a plan of action for their removal. Because of the generality of these findings, the model may be tested in and applied to other large public organizations that share similar structure, organizational setup, political connotations or operational constraints.

The study’s informal approach to acquiring and conducting interviews, drawing on the professional networks of the researchers, allowed us to establish with a high degree of certainty that the interview subjects we had contacted were in fact people who could speak with much authority on the state of play of SP in the UN. By asking for personal opinions and not recording the answers, we were able to get a deeper understanding of the underlying issues and controversies that trigger the barriers. This immediacy to the studied field may also be a limitation of the study, as our personal opinions and bias are strengthened when working on subject matter so close to our daily jobs. Finally, the small sample size, compounded by the fact that only two subjects were approached at each agency, introduces the possibility of a large amount of variance in the barriers reported. This issue is partly accommodated by the fact that only seven UN agencies account for nearly 90 % of the UN’s procurement volume, and by speaking to the right people in these agencies, a realistic picture of the field can be obtained.

7.2 Suggestions for Further Research

This has been an exploratory study to determine which kinds of barriers procurement policymakers and practitioners encounter in their efforts to implement sustainable procurement. As such, our focus has been on the discovery, identification, and rudimentary ranking of SP barriers. The proposed framework of barriers should therefore be considered an initial investigation into this subject area, and not a conclusive report on the state of play. To arrive at a more robust and thorough framework, the current research can be expanded on in several directions.

First of all, one possible next step would be to test the framework statistically by submitting a survey to a much larger field of respondents than the twenty interview subjects represented in this study. This would supply our preliminary investigation with some statistical rigor, which would allow us to make stronger claims concerning the relative importance of barriers. Also, this would provide a clearer picture of the variance of responses in different categories, bringing forward the barriers that can account for the different stages of implementation of UN agencies. Another way to test the framework is to expand the analysis through a Delphi study, whereby the same sample of interview subjects would be made privy to the results of the first round of analysis and be given the opportunity to revise and re-rank the discovered barriers on the basis of this information through several iterations of questionnaires. Another research direction could be exploring whether a correlation exist between the organizational characteristics of the UN agencies and the barriers identified within them; and more specifically on the correlation between the level of maturity in SP implementation and the typologies of barriers that emerge from the research. Finally, the proposed sequential model of SP implementation should be tested at other political organizations to examine the generalizability of our findings.