Approaches to Green Public Procurement for Deforestation-free Commodities - Insights into strategies, considerations and evaluations within the GPP development processes of deforestation-risk commodities for the food and catering services sector

Abstract

Following the implementation of revised EU guidelines on GPP in 2019, some European countries have taken action to revise and update their own national action plans or guidelines as well. With the new EU GPP guidelines, deforestation now is also included for cocoa, palm oil and soy. This study takes a closer look at the GPP policies and the respective development and implementation processes of 9 European countries (BE, DE, DK, ES, IT, NL, NO, UK). It also examines to what extent the focus forest-risk commodities, cocoa, palm oil, soy, beef and leather are included in the scope and contents of national GPP policy. Data in this research is obtained through a focus group discussion followed by subsequent in-depth interviews and by analysing European and national scale official public procurement documentation supplemented by a general desk research. GPP experts (total of 13) for both the focus group and indepth interviews were sourced using the ADP network and through the principles of convenience sampling. Findings show that many countries are currently working to incorporate more stringent criteria and moving towards guidelines that have deforestation-free commodities included as a requirement. Rather than developing own criteria, countries refer to certification schemes in their guidelines. Not all certification schemes explicitly mention deforestation. Current GPP guidelines do not ensure deforestation-free commodity procurement in most cases. Implementation across all public institutions (central and lower levels) remains a challenge because of a high degree of decentralisation in the GPP governance structure in all countries. Moving forward, recommended actions are a revision of criteria to include all forest-risk commodities in all product groups, without the omission of indirect use, additional knowledge and capacity building for lower level public institutions and improving GPP monitoring practices.