Environmental criteria in public-private partnerships: Insights from French public real estate contracts

Our purpose in this communication is to give some insights into the integration of environment-oriented criteria in public procurement policy and particularly in public-private partnership contracts. If the efficiency of public procurement as a vector of implementation of horizontal public policy may be put into question, as its capacity to generate significant spill-over effects on private markets, we do consider that the potential of public-private partnerships may be more promising because of the inner nature of such contracts (their long term duration, the global mission given to the private partner, the contract focalization on the outcomes its risk sharing nature and its awarding procedure). To illustrate this point we do consider the cases of energy-efficiency contracts and public-real estate deals inasmuch these arrangements are very well fitted for helping governments to implement their environmental strategies. From the study of a sample of French PPP contracts for which we dispose of the weight of the different awarding criteria, we derive some stylized facts and hypothesis that can be tested in further researches with regard to the signal effect produced by these criteria on procurement market participant