The role of change agents in sustainable public procurement projects

Abstract

In the procurement process the decisions of project teams determine if the potential of sustainable procurement is attained. To optimize this, project teams should be encouraged to adopt new behaviour. The academic literature awards an encouraging role to the change agent. A comparison of the role of change agents in seven Dutch public procurement projects shows that change agents play an important role in sustainable procurement projects and help project teams progress towards sustainable procurement.

Keywords:

• Change agent
• organizational change
• project teams
• public procurement
• sustainable procurement

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the Dutch Ministry of the Interior and Kingdom Relations for financially supporting the research, the practitioners who contributed to this study, and the three anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments.

Notes

*‘Green procurement’, ‘green purchasing’ and ‘eco- procurement’ are terms used to describe the same phenomenon. The term ‘sustainable procurement’ is used in this paper because it is the closest match to the name of the Dutch policy: Duurzaam Inkopen. Only the environmental aspects of sustainability are discussed here.

*Facility goods procured by the government are categorized (for example office supplies, energy, catering) and subsequently appointed to a specific ministry responsible for developing a government-wide procurement strategy and often procurement. WBMs are part of the catering category, which is assigned to the Ministry of Economic Affairs.