Sustainable Procurement: Literature Review: Report #1

Our community has increasing expectations of government and private industry to support sustainable products and practices. There is also great interest shown by industry to reduce waste and emissions, and improve social outcomes. Driven by industry’s desire to modify behaviours that contribute to unsustainable practices, the SBEnrc’s Sustainable Procurement project is dedicated to examining key issues across the procurement life cycle and focusses on finding practical ways to improve environmental, social, and economic sustainability outcomes in the housing, building and infrastructure sectors in Australia. This report presents a review of literature on key issues around sustainable procurement practices including, the definition, benefits, policies and guidelines, barriers and drivers, assessments, stakeholder’s role, and COVID-19 impact on sustainable procurement, nationally and internationally. Although policies and guidelines have been developed to guide organisations’ sustainable procurement practices, the implementation of the policies and guidelines remains problematic in practice. The complexity of identifying products and services that genuinely support sustainable development goals, while representing value-for-money presents a significant challenge to achieving the sustainable goals of organisations. Despite many efforts in measuring sustainability, most of them failed to consider an integrated approach taking into account of environmental, economic and social aspects. The previous research on sustainable procurement were clearly dominated by environmental dimension, while the social aspects are widely ignored. The shortage of quantitative procurement models concentrating on environmental and social responsibility was also noted. Sustainable procurement is a major change to industry practices that requires a shift in approach, priorities, and practices of all stakeholders involved. The successful transformation will require synergetic efforts from government, client organisations and other stakeholders. Covid-19 crisis has brought global economies to a standstill and has created unprecedented challenges too many sectors including housing, building and infrastructure, which highlights the critical need for right time, right place procurement decisions to be resilient and better positioned when the pandemic subsides. It is therefore critical to enhance the traceability and transparency of supply chain management and help to reinforce the path towards the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, setting new industry standards in sustainable practices. This review has provided the foundation on which empirical study could further explore industry and government experiences of sustainable procurement.