Policy-led public procurement: does strategic procurement deliver?

Public procurement can be leveraged to impact on business, the economy and society to support and can even lead broader government policy implementation (Harland et al., 2019; Glas et al., 2017). Examples of this include stimulating innovation (Wesseling and Edquist, 2018) and encouraging small-business entrepreneurship (Glas and Eßig, 2018; Di Mauro et al., 2020). Public procurement can be a mechanism for delivering better social outcomes (Grandia and Meehan, 2017; Uenk and Telgen, 2019), wider sustainability issues (Adjei-Bamfo et al., 2019; Sönnichsen and Clement, 2020) and can play a role in encouraging social responsibility in private sector organisations (Flammer, 2018; Ma et al., 2020). Targeted public procurement can impact on employment (Flynn, 2018; Wontner et al., 2020). In several countries, public procurement has been shown to improve quality of local public services and economic development (Vecchiato and Roveda, 2014; Uyarra et al., 2020). Use of domestic suppliers in public contracts impacts national economies (Uyarra et al., 2014). If used strategically, public procurement can promote competition in supply markets (Patrucco et al., 2017). Last but not least, the recent Covid-19 pandemic has shown how public procurement becomes instrumental in mitigating effects of emergencies (Handfield et al., 2020). In emergencies, governments have powers to intervene and override normal procurement arrangements (Atkinson et al., 2020), and they can lead a coordinated response to minimise the impact of disruption of supply of critical goods and services (Vecchi et al., 2020). We term all these goals and achievements as policy-led public procurement