Sustainable Procurement: knowledge and practice towards sustainable development. Giappichelli (in pubblicazione)

In recent decades, sustainability has become a goal to be achieved throughout the world; it is a direction into which efforts are to be put to solve the global challenges that people are facing today. The spectrum of Sustainable Goals is extensive and wide, ranging from poverty reduction, to human rights and equality of opportunity, and to environmental issues, such as biodiversity conservation, energy efficiency, climate mitigation and adaptation, and waste reduction (see, among others, UNEP, 2017 and UNOPS, 2017). The concept of sustainability has emerged since the 1970s. Today, it has become a crucial paradigm in supply chain management (SCM) (Seuring and Müller, 2008) and is also the foundation for one of the most significant international cooperation initiatives (i.e. the agenda for Sustainable Development Goals 2030), which explicitly highlights procurement as an effective way to support the achievement of sustainable objectives. Indeed, a variety of activities and processes have been substantially influenced and involved, and “procurement” is one of them. Leveraging procurement to achieve sustainable objectives by integrating related requirements, specifications and criteria that are compatible and in favour of the protection of the environment, of social progress and in support of economic development, namely by seeking resource efficiency, improving the quality of products and services and ultimately optimizing costs, beyond the acquisition of works/products/services to merely satisfy organization’s requirements, is defined as sustainable procurement (SP) 1. To achieve these social and environmental objectives, both public and private organizations ought to integrate sustainable considerations and principles into their procurement processes; also, procurement plays a crucial role as sustainability policies and practices should extend beyond organizations’ boundaries. In light of the demand to include sustainable principles within the procurement practice on the one hand, and the complexity of operations and required knowledge and understanding on the other (Carter and Rogers, 2008), there is growing interest in exploring and investigating how SCM and procurement in both the public and private sector can be en- 1 UN global marketplace, see https://www.ungm.org/Shared/KnowledgeCenter/Pages/PT_SUST 10 couraged to practice sustainably and reduce their social and environmental footprint. In the private sector, the purchasing function plays a strategic role in helping a firm reach its sustainable development objectives, as acknowledged by an increasing body of research and publications on sustainable procurement (e.g. Walker and Phillips, 2009). More recently, research attention has moved to commitment to sustainability both through supply chain management and measurement. In the private sector, there is a long history of research on corporate social responsibility and the bulk of sustainable SCM research is concerning environmental issues; social issues are also examined broadly. With regard to public procurement, until recently, how effective policy initiatives have been has driven supply chain sustainability management and measurement, given the large scale of public procurement and its capability to achieve sustainable goals across supply chains (Amann et al., 2014). This book is about how procurement performs as an effective tool in the pursuit of sustainability objectives, in particular environmental goals. The term “procurement”, in this book, is defined in a broad sense and is in line with the “umbrella” usage of the term (Snider and Rendon, 2012). “Procurement” here encompasses all dimensions of the acquiring activities for products, works and services, including management of the organization’s supply, e.g., sourcing in supply chain, outsourcing, private and public partnership etc., Within this range, topics investigated in the book loot at sustainable procurement practices in both public and private sectors, including innovative and practical experience and retrospective academic research findings in these fields, which provide knowledge and perspectives on some specific issues of SP.