Sustainable public procurement practice in Bangladesh : reviewing the legal documents

Abstract

Sustainable Public Procurement (SPP) is a growing concern of the time to seek balance between three fundamental cornerstones of sustainable procurement – social, environmental, economicalong with ensuring good governance by adopting fairness, competitiveness, transparency, accountability in the procurement of goods, works and services using public fund. To ensure good governance specially in public procurement, Government of Bangladesh showed it’s commitment by adopting Public Procurement Act, Public Procurement Rule and developing Standard Tender Documents from early decade of the century. It is also mentionable that electronic government procurement is an excellent tool used by government agencies over time towards meeting the commitment. Government is now looking forward to respond the call of time through Sustainable Public Procurement Policy which is recently developed. The study report tried to scrutiny public procurement legal documents under practice and attempted to sketch up the strength and weakness of these documents and way forward. Current documents have some excellent command over various sustainability issues, like social, economic, environmental considerations through addressing labor issues, environmental issues, local enterprise encouragement issues. Yet these are inadequate to meet the current demand of sustainability considerations. Bangladesh Public Procurement Authority (BPPA) has recently developed SPP policy paper and now working to develop necessary follow up documents. SPP policy considers climate change issues, the cost of ownership, whole life cycle costing, most economically advantageous tender and other modern concepts to ensure sustainability in public procurement. Following the best practices in the world Bangladesh is committed to develop globally accepted documents for proper implementation of SPP. Qualified resources and manpower is a prime concern in this regard to achieve the target of a sustainable green world and contribute for future generation.