Sustainable public procurement: the Federal Public Institution's shared system.
| Autor | Silva, Renato Cader Da |
| Cargo | Sustainable public procurement |
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Introduction
Society has increasingly required effective actions by public and private organizations to foster a socially fair, economically efficient and environmentally responsible market, moving toward what is expected from sustainable development (Preuss and Walker, 2011; Magalhaes, 2012), understood as the "development that meets the needs of the present generation, without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs" (Organizacao das Nacoes Unidas, 1991, p. 41).
This perspective requires the State to adopt initiatives toward sustainable development in the country, which demands public managers to align to new paradigms and courses of the Brazilian public administration. Among its actions is the contracting for carrying out its activities, when government acts as a major buyer of goods and services. In 2014, the Brazilian Government spent 20.2 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) on consumption expenses, according to data from the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatistica, 2014), a fact that strengthens the financial potential of this activity.
At the international level, these values vary, in developed countries, between eight and 25 percent of their GDP (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, 2008; United Nations Environment Programme and Procurement Capacity Development Center, 2012; European Commission, 2011; Walker and Brammer, 2012). In developing countries, in turn, this number is close to 30 percent of GDP (Preuss and Walker, 2011, United Nations Environment Programme and Procurement Capacity Development Center, 2012), and in the so-called emerging countries, it exceeds 30 percent of GDP (International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD), 2010; United Nations Environment Programme, 2011).
In this sense, the organizational development of the units that deal with the activities related to contracting is essential, so that managers can have a more strategic vision, with a multidisciplinary background, in an environment of dialogue between legal, administrative, economic, environmental and social sciences, among others, in order to grant efficiency and effectiveness to these activities. Also, they must comply with the constitutional obligation of not harming the environment and society by them. To do this, institutional convergence between the so-called middle areas and end areas is relentless. Administrative activities must adhere to the mission, to institutional values and to strategic planning, as well as to the several administrative and finalistic projects and processes of their bodies (Silva, 2016).
Therefore, this study aims to analyze how sustainable public procurement was established at the Federal Public Institution. More specifically, it seeks to identify the reasons and main implications of adopting the sustainable shared acquisitions system in this government body. From the methodological standpoint, this study adopted a qualitative approach and an empirical investigation of MPF's experience, based on a documentary research and participant observation.
To make sustainable development possible through public consumption, MPF prepared its Institutional Strategic Planning (ISP) for the period 2011-2020, and one of its goals is: "To provide an institutional performance which is strategic, effective, fast, transparent and sustainable" [1].
The Administration Secretariat (SA), a unit linked to MPF's General Secretariat, has the challenge of promoting management instruments and tools that guide the subordinate units to act with a focus on strategy, aiming to continuously improve the quality of their processes.
This system began to be implemented in the second half of 2014, when the SA [2] created a specific unit in its organizational structure, named Coordination of Strategic National Contracting (CCNE). Among its attributions are the shared acquisitions, supported by sustainability criteria, together with all MPF units, through the standardization of goods and services' purchases, seeking to provide greater economy and quality in contracting, based on prior planning. Purchases are made through the Technical Group for Shared Purchases (GTCC), involving all state/regional secretaries and units' management coordinators (Silva, 2016). The first shared acquisitions were already made, and their results are very tangible in terms of procedural, scale and quality gains, as will be described in detail further ahead.
Hence, the Federal Public Institution's system of sustainable shared procurement established a new governance model [3], applying the concept of sustainability throughout the contracting life cycle. This model is a kind of compass, so that workers and units involved in contracting can act in a systemic and integrated way, in order to optimize human, logistical and budgetary resources, among others.
This procurement model requires the effort of several teams and units of the institution, which effectively participated in the GTCC, under the coordination of the SA (Silva, 2016). Besides the attributions related to the support and the achievement of sustainable shared acquisitions, this group improves the quality of MPF's planning for contracting. With this goal, the so-called menu of shared purchases is prepared--an instrument that defines the shared contracting to be made in the next two years [4]. There are different objects for contracting, such as goods of common use, services and information technology, among others. A differential of the menu is that the units of other States can also manage the shared purchases. So, it is a way to take advantage of the expertise accumulated by the units and, at the same time, to motivate their workers. This study contributes to a reflection on the implementation process of this system, besides pointing to the various challenges for its accomplishment, which grants a strategic tone to MPF procurement, focusing on its institutional mission.
With this purpose, the paper is divided into five parts. After this brief introduction, we present the theoretical framework on "Sustainable public procurement", highlighting its insertion in the Brazilian scenario in recent years, and approaching such debate to the shared purchase mechanism. Next, we describe the "Methodology" used in this study. The fourth section presents the MPF case, emphasizing the main reasons for the implementation of a shared acquisitions system, together with its main developments. At the end, we present the final considerations.
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Sustainable public procurement
In this study, sustainable public procurement is understood as the process by which public organizations, in order to meet their needs for goods, services and construction works, rate the actual costs of their acquisitions, seeking to generate benefits not only to public administration, but also for the society and the economy, by minimizing damages to the environment. This concept is fully in line with the definition made by the Sustainable Public Procurement Task Force of the 2003 Marrakech Process, and has already been adopted by several countries; hence, it is no longer a new concept in the international and national scenes.
According to Betiol (2013), sustainable public procurement programs have been developed in OECD countries, including the European Union, the USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Japan. In emerging countries, it is possible to identify Brazil, China, India, and more recently South Africa, as countries that have been investing on this theme, either through strict norms, or through programs or practices in sustainable contracting (Perera et al, 2007).
From the papers by Erdmenger (2003), Betiol (2013), and Alencastro et al (2014), we can extract a historical review of the topic's entry into the agenda of European countries, highlighting that the first countries to deal with the subject were Germany, which has a sustainable public procurement policy since 1986 [5], followed by Austria, Denmark, the Netherlands and Sweden. As early as the 1970s, Germany had developed a government green label called "Blue Angel," which pointed to products that had environmental criteria of sustainability. Since the 1980s, Austria has a number of cities that have put into practice the process of sustainable procurement, based on the 1993 bidding law, which defined that environmental issues needed to be taken into consideration in bidding processes. Denmark has a mandatory adhesion norm for sustainable public procurement in government bodies since 1994. In the Netherlands, public contracting is recognized as an environmental protection policy since 1990, and the market has responded to this government demand by producing with sustainability criteria. Finally, in Sweden, the theme has been discussed since 1990.
The requirement to observe attributes of environmental and social sustainability in public contracting aims to achieve the public interest, and is supported by international agreements that Brazil has signed, by the constitutional and legal order, by public policies established in the country, and by infralegal norms (Betiol, 2013).
At the international level, Brazil started to commit to sustainable production and consumption at the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (ECO-92), when it signed the Global Agenda 21 (United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, 1992) [6].
Approximately ten years later, the Brazilian Agenda 21 was published, strengthening the country's commitment to sustainable development, with a view of effective participation of the state, the market and the organized civil society. Until then, the topic "sustainable ? public procurement" had always been treated timidly in the semantic universe of sustainable production and consumption, and could be seen in organizations' practices, through an effort of the servants, who considered it to be more a...
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