Public Procurement as Secondary Policy

The role of public procurement as a means to implement secondary policy has been increasingly emphasised in the last few decades. Besides being the primary sourcing instrument for public agencies, public procurement could be used to stimulate all kinds of new behaviour, including innovation, sustainability and energy efficiency. The evolution and diffusion of these principles and practices have been preceded by debates and discussions where certain axioms have played an important role to shape the agenda. Axioms are rarely debated, ‘self-evident’ and taken-for-granted assumptions about the real world. This book examines four axioms which have been used in the debates regarding using public procurement as an instrument for secondary policy implementation - the assumption of demand as the driver of innovation, the promotion of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), the negligence of measuring, and the use of functional specification.

This book will be of interest to both academics and policymakers in the fields of public management, public administration and policy and related disciplines.