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The purpose of this study is to discuss policy review in the interest of sustainable innovations in Malaysia’s public procurement. This study also offers the overall relationship between existing policies related to sustainable innovations in public procurement and the coherences towards the four dimensions of sustainable innovations.

This study outlines the current policies in Malaysia which are related to sustainable innovation initiatives and explores the cohesiveness that appears disconnected and understood separately. Policy content analysis is conducted on the current policies related to sustainable innovations in the context of Malaysia’s public procurement.

This study observed that the current policies related to sustainable innovations in public procurement are actually interconnected with each other through a hierarchical framework. This study also demonstrates that the 12th Malaysia Plan has comprehensively encompassed every aspect of the environment, social, economic and innovation to contribute to one primary goal – green economic growth.

The proposed policy framework is expected to be beneficial for the administrator executive among the civil servant to connect the independent policies and, at the same time, contribute to the overall goal of green economic growth. Through a broad policy structure too, this study helps the industry player to recognize their potential in any area related to sustainable innovation.

The policy framework illustrated is new to the literature, especially in Malaysia’s context. The compilation of current policy grounded by the 12th Malaysia Plan has not been presented in any publications.

This study aims to highlight the effect of individual attributes of procurement professionals on goals concerning public procurement of sustainable innovation. Several barriers haven been observed regarding the application of public money to achieve these goals. Most research concerning these barriers focuses on organizational factors. Corporate initiatives are typically presented as a way forward tot achieve sustainable innovation. Less attention is paid to the efforts and attributes of the individual procurement professional.

A questionnaire was sent to 283 officials, involved in the procurement process of a large public organization.

As expected, a lack of top management support has a negative impact on sustainable innovation. Legal and regulatory complexity is less of a hindrance. The results indicate that both individual innovativeness and individual collectivism have a significant positive effect on sustainable innovation. Findings further suggest that an important way for an organization to achieve sustainable innovation is to allow individuals sufficient discretion to pursue sustainable initiatives. Many initiatives can be attributed to the individual innovativeness of procurement professionals.

The relation beween individual attributes of procurement professionals on the application of public money to achieve goals of sustainable innovation is investigated and can serve as a basis for further sudy on this subject.

This paper examines the role of government procurement as a social policy mechanism within a multilateral open trading system. Government regulations globally are being transformed to foster more responsible business conduct in multinational enterprises (MNEs). Yet, concern that sustainability may present a discriminatory barrier to trade has stalled the progress of sustainable public procurement (SPP) at the international level, raising questions regarding the role and scope of the World Trade Organisation’s (WTO) Government Procurement Agreement (GPA) to align taxpayer-funded contracts with the United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals.

With a focus on social sustainability, this paper reviews the grey and academic literature to assess the changing landscape of public procurement policy and supply chain legislation in high-income countries.

Frontrunner nations are adopting a mandatory approach to sustainable public procurement and due diligence legislation is elevating supply chain risk from reputational damage to legal liability. While technological innovation and the clean, green production of manufactured goods dominates the sustainable public procurement literature, the social aspects of sustainability poverty, inequality and human rights remain underrepresented.

The scope of this paper is limited to the examination of government procurement covered by the WTO-GPA (2012). Smaller value contracts, under the WTO-GPA thresholds and the category of defence are beyond the scope of the paper.

The paper focusses on the underserved topic of social sustainability in business-to-government (B2G) – business to government – supply chains arguing that for responsible business conduct to become a competitive advantage, it must be more meaningfully rewarded on the demand-side of all taxpayer-funded contracts in organisation for economic co-operation and development countries. The paper introduces the idea of priceless procurement as a mechanism to build system capacity in the evaluation of non-financial sustainability objectives.

To build the capacity to stimulate competition based on social and environmental policy objectives, the paper introduces the concept of priceless procurement in B2G contracts.

While the contribution of supply chain management to sustainability is receiving increasing attention in the private sector, there is still a scarcity of parallel studies of public procurement. Hence the purpose of this paper is to explore the ways in which local government authorities in England use their procurement function to foster sustainable development.

The paper uses an exploratory approach. Based on a review of the existing literature, qualitative research into leading local government authorities is undertaken to draw out the multiple ways in which public procurement can support sustainable development.

At an aggregate level, local government procurers have adopted a wide range of initiatives to address all three aspects of sustainability. These are condensed into a typology of sustainable supply chain management for the public sector.

The study highlights the importance of supporting factors, like transparency, organisational culture and strategy as well as leeway in public policy, for sustainable supply chain management in the public sector.

The experience of the best practice local authorities deserves wider recognition among practitioners, policy makers and academic researchers, not least given the objective of the UK government to be among the leaders in the European Union on sustainable procurement by 2009.

The proposed typology of sustainable supply chain management for the public sector can serve as a basis for future research in this area.

It is unclear as to what extent sustainable procurement is being practised in Ireland and what barriers there are to implementing it in organisations. This study provides the first complete insight into the use of sustainable procurement in Irish commercial semi-state bodies. It explores the extent and type of use of sustainable procurement plus identifies and examines the challenges to its use. A deductive approach is utilised to determine the barriers. Eleven participants, nine from the commercial semistate bodies and two experts with knowledge of this subject, are interviewed using semi-structured questions. The research findings show that sustainable procurement is being practised in the majority of the commercial semi-state bodies. Definition of sustainable procurement, the absence of mandatory guidelines, cost, time and a dearth of sustainable procurement knowledge by suppliers are some of the main barriers put forward by participants.

Human resources practices, particularly regarding environmental training, play a key role in the dissemination of sustainable supply chain practices, especially sustainable procurement. Both environmental training and sustainable procurement can prompt environmental maturity (EM) among organizations. However, little is known about the relationship between environmental training and the adoption of sustainable procurement in public sector organizations of emerging economies, such as Brazil. In this context, the purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between environmental training and the adoption of sustainable procurement in three Brazilian public/state universities.

This research is qualitative and includes an exploratory study based on in-depth interviews with experts from the procurement section of Brazilian public universities. A methodological framework is proposed to analyze the results. The main questions that guided this study were: is there a relationship between the environmental-training initiatives and the adoption of sustainable procurement? Does this relationship, whether positive or negative, improve the maturity of environmental sustainability? And what is the future outlook for this issue in the context of public universities in Brazil?

According to the results’ analysis, the impact of sustainable procurement practices among the public organizations analyzed was almost void. The environmental training produced limited accomplishments, although respondents viewed it as a source of potential improvement, which indicates a co-evolution of sustainable procurement, environmental training and EM. In the cases analyzed, an alignment was identified among the levels of sustainable procurement and environmental training adoption.

It was identified that the lacks of training and support from senior management, environmental culture, great bureaucracy and economic factors were considered barriers and difficulties to implementing environmental procurement practices. These barriers deserve further study.

There is a lack of research on the relationship between environmental training and the adoption of sustainable procurement in emerging economies and in public sector organizations.

In general, there are many disincentives standing in the way of promoting change in public procurement practices by government agencies. Because engaging in sustainable purchasing requires some level of entrepreneurialism and risk-taking, a sorting framework is adopted to gauge whether some organizations are systematically more likely to pursue sustainable public purchasing (SPP) efforts than others. One-way analysis of variance and other methods are applied to a survey of public procurement practitioners across over 300 governments in the U.S. Results strongly suggest that agencies of various scope and reach tend to abstain from aggressively pursuing SPP efforts. However, when they do employ SPP, these efforts tend to be quite variable across and within levels of government and organizational size. In an effort to bridge theory with empirical data, a strong case can be made that the current state of SPP in the United States is the result of random and very cautious experimentation with little systematic pattern to SPP adoption.

This study aims to investigate sustainable procurement in the UK public sector.

Sustainable procurement is investigated using a questionnaire that draws on established scales for “purchasing social responsibility”. The survey was administered across the UK public sector, and 106 responses were received from procurement officers.

Analysis of quantitative and qualitative survey data reveal there is significant variation across public sector agencies in the nature of sustainable procurement practice. Local authorities have a particularly strong emphasis on buying from local and small suppliers relative to other sectors, health looks generally lower in many categories, and education appears to have something of an emphasis on environmental aspects of sustainable procurement. Cost has been found to be the leading barrier to sustainable procurement, and top management support the leading facilitator.

There is likely to be selection bias in the sample, with those practitioners engaging in the sustainability agenda being more likely to have responded to the questionnaire. The United Kingdom government has an objective amongst the leaders in Europe on sustainable procurement by 2009, and early signs are encouraging that progress towards this goal is underway.

This paper provides the first survey of sustainable procurement practices across the UK public sector. It also provides a conceptual framework of influences upon the propensity to engage in sustainable procurement practice.

Little is known about the way local government utilizes the procurement function to promote sustainability. Sustainability is a political theme of considerable importance at the local government level. We investigated the relationships between municipal executive councillors and procurement managers in three Dutch municipalities. We found that the party-political councillors focus on initiatives affecting citizens to create public visibility and electoral support. Procurement managers however, are primarily concerned with stakeholders within the organization serving different interests. Sustainability initiatives appear largely input-based rather than result-based. Procurement managers rarely consult with the councillors. Rather, department heads have the final say in allocating funds in the course of sustainability initiatives.

Public procurement is a major driving force that can be used to advance societal goals such as sustainability. The lack of strategic management and top-level commitment have been found to be major hindrances to the promotion of sustainable public procurement (SPP). This study aims to examine the functioning of a successful Finnish SPP development programme, the KEINO Academy (2019–2020), that tackled these challenges in a holistic way.

The article is mainly based on qualitative analysis of interviews with 24 municipal representatives.

The KEINO Academy advanced SPP management through the following functions: legitimising SPP development work, structuring SPP development work, offering expert support and facilitating peer support. The functions were mainly able to meet the key challenges experienced by the participating municipalities. However, some challenges cannot be directly solved by an intermediary such as the KEINO Academy. These challenges include, for example, a lack of resources.

On the basis of the study, SPP development programmes should: build a holistic working model; respect the versatility of the participating organisations; involve all the key people in the organisations, including the directors; and sustain change.

The main theoretical contribution is the combination of two streams of literature, those of SPP management and intermediary functions. Further, the article makes an empirical contribution by studying the KEINO Academy as a pioneering SPP development case.