SUSTAINABLE AND CIRCULAR PUBLIC PROCUREMENT: BARRIERS AND DRIVERS

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to identify and analyze initiatives, barriers and drivers of sustainable public procurement (SPP) and circular public procurement (CPP), through a literature review, with international coverage of the 7 years (2016 at 2022). As a methodology for structuring this bibliometric literature review without meta-analysis we have been based on the Prisma 2020 protocol and use the Web of Science as a data source. Keywords defined for search were: public procurement; circular; sustainable. As a result, in the end, we identified 23 articles that were included in the literature review, as they meet the inclusion criteria assumed. The barriers found were coded in 07 categories: direction/organization; culture/resistance to change; lack of competences/training; financial questions/costs; regulation; social; market. The drivers were codified as: a) external factors: pressure from regulation; customer/consumer pressure; market: social pressure; policy; b) internal factors: direction/organization; culture; competences/training; financial questions/costs. Our analysis points out that both in studies focused on developed countries and those under development, the factors that appear most identified as barriers are strongly concentrated on internal issues related to “direction and organization”, which are also the same factors pointed out in identification of SPP and CPP key drivers. However, the results also bring evidence that, unlike developed countries, barriers classified as “culture/resistance to change, as well as barriers inherent in “financial issues/costs are still a major obstacle to developing countries. However, we conclude that the main challenge of public agents to adopt SPP and CPP is related to the strengthening of their leaders' commitment to this purpose and the development of the organizational capacity of their managers, regardless of the country's level of development.