Building a Sustainable Society: Construction, Public Procurement Policy and ‘Best Practice’ in the European Union

David Olsson, Andreas Öjehag-Pettersson and Mikael Granberg
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David Olsson: Political Science, Department of Political, Historical, Religious and Cultural Studies, Karlstad University, 651 88 Karlstad, Sweden
Andreas Öjehag-Pettersson: Political Science, Department of Political, Historical, Religious and Cultural Studies, Karlstad University, 651 88 Karlstad, Sweden
Mikael Granberg: Political Science, Department of Political, Historical, Religious and Cultural Studies, Karlstad University, 651 88 Karlstad, Sweden

Sustainability, 2021, vol. 13, issue 13, 1-18

Abstract: Sustainability and sustainable development are political and essentially contested social phenomena. Despite this ambiguity, they continue to hold a central position as apolitical concepts in much of social science and policy making. In Europe, public procurement is increasingly used as a tool to reach sustainability, a fact that actualizes an inherent tension between politically charged objectives on the one hand, and technological processes and market logics on the other. Therefore, in this article, we investigate this tension by studying policies relating to sustainable public procurement of the built environment in the EU. We argue that governing any policy domain entails the construction and representation of particular policy problems. Hence, we focus on how the ‘problems’ of sustainable public procurement are represented in EU policy guidance and best practice documents. Our analysis shows that these central policy documents are dominated by a problem representation where unsustainability is constructed as technical design flaws and market failure. This has the primary effect that it renders sustainable development as, primarily, a technical issue, and beyond politics. Therefore, we conclude that current policy reproduces ‘weak’ forms of sustainable development, where the practice is depoliticized and premised upon continued growth and innovation.

Keywords: sustainability; sustainable development; public procurement; construction; European Union (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
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