Socially responsible public procurement

Deadline: Sep 26, 2019  
CALL EXPIRED

Scope:

By using purchasing power to choose socially responsible goods, services and works, public authorities at different levels can set a positive example and encourage enterprises to make wider use of social standards in the management, production and provision of services.

Socially responsible public procurement provides incentives to companies to develop socially responsible products and services.

At EU level, the 2014 EU public procurement legal framework[1] entered into force in April 2016, opening up new opportunities for public authorities to promote socially responsible public procurement. A number of projects have been launched in order to encourage public authorities to include social clause to their purchasing procedures.

However, implementing socially responsible public procurement in practice remains a challenge and experience shows that the opportunities arising from the existing legal framework are still insufficiently used. In addition, different regional/local public authorities, given their competencies in the field and specific conditions, address this challenge with different approach and different success level.

The "Socially Responsible Public Procurement (SRPP) Mission” will bring together a county accompanied by social economy stakeholders experienced in SRPP on one side and those counties accompanied by social economy stakeholders interested in the topic. The SRPP Mission will enable presentation and interrogation of the success story in more details, it will help to identify its successes and challenges and to understand existing procurement practices in other partner counties. It will provide a platform for exchange of views on more developed collaboration in the field.

Expected Impact:

The overall objective of this call is to support a network of EU regional and local authorities with similar priorities and experts in the field and via inter-regional collaboration contribute to gradual setting up of a permanent community of practice in the field of social economy as the key component of a sustainable European economic system.

The Social Economy Missions call for proposal will support social economy consortia to pursue inter-regional collaboration through a set of social economy missions: the call foresees to create opportunities and incentives to engage in strategic inter-regional collaboration and develop collaborative projects between regional/local authorities and social economy stakeholders.

The specific objectives to be achieved through this call for proposals are the following:

• Enhancing inter-regional interaction between social economy stakeholders (public and private sector) in the field of social economy missions’ priorities;
• Improving collaboration between existing social economy networks at regional and local level in the field of social economy missions’ priorities;
• Learning from counties more advanced in the social economy mission priority;
• Preparing the ground for future structured collaboration in the field of social economy missions’ priorities (future joint inter-regional projects under the new EU programming period 2021-2027);
• Preparing the ground for future collaboration with the European Commission in the field of the social economy missions’ priorities;
• Preparing the ground for possible replication of functional model applied in the consortium leader’s county;
• Contributing to a gradual Social Economy community building.

The social economy missions will bring together regional and local authorities with similar social economy priorities and accompanied by a representative number of regional and local social economy stakeholders (social enterprises, SMEs, etc.).

[1]http://ec.europa.eu/growth/single-market/public-procurement/rules-implementation_en