Green public procurement (GPP) has been high on governments’ agendas for more than a decade, with an increasing number of countries leveraging their purchasing power to procure goods, services and works in ways that reduce their environmental impact. All the OECD countries responding to the 2024 survey on the OECD Recommendation on Public Procurement report incorporating environmental objectives into their procurement-specific policy documents.
Translating green objectives into concrete obligations, such as predefined targets, helps guide implementation and facilitate effective monitoring, reporting and evaluation. Monitoring can also reveal challenges and bottlenecks, creating a positive feedback loop to continuously improve GPP-related policies, action plans and operational tools.
Slightly more than two-thirds of OECD countries (24 out of 35, 69%) report setting quantitative targets for GPP (Figure 11.6). These might include overall procurement targets (e.g. requiring 80% of procurement by value or number of tenders, to include GPP criteria by a certain year) or only for certain groups of products or services. For example, in France, the National Plan for Sustainable Procurement 2022-2025 sets a target for 100% of public contracts to include at least one environmental consideration by 2025, while in Mexico, office paper purchases must contain at least 50% recycled or sustainably sourced fibres. Targets may also differ across national, regional and local levels of government. Countries can also include operational targets related to public procurement (e.g. mandating GPP training for all public procurement staff by a specific year).
However, despite the widespread recognition of the potential of public procurement to contribute to sustainability goals, there is only limited measurement of whether this is having an impact on the environment, such as saving CO₂ emissions. This highlights a missed opportunity to assess and promote the concrete impact of public procurement, a key economic activity, on environmental factors. As of 2024, of the 29 OECD countries that have key performance indicators for their public procurement system, only 3 – Finland, New Zealand and Norway (10%) – report measuring its impact on the environment (Figure 11.7). For instance, Norway publishes detailed reports on the public sector’s climate footprint from procurement and has developed a tool to estimate climate footprints at both government-wide and organisational levels.
Although 11 out of 29 OECD countries (38%) are developing methodologies for measuring environmental impact (Figure 11.7), they may face practical challenges. Data constraints often hinder accurate assessments, as procurement data may not be granular enough to distinguish between specific products, relying instead on broad product categories for which the environmental footprint can only be averaged. In addition, assessing lifecycle emissions is difficult due to data scarcity and a lack of consensus on key assessment elements, such as system boundaries and the allocation of impacts to processes.
