The shortlisted Procura+ Awards candidates have been announced in all four categories: Sustainable Procurement of the Year, Innovation Procurement of the year with the subcategory Outstanding Innovation Procurement in ICT, and Procurement Initiative of the year. The Procura+ Awards is an initiative of ICLEI, in co-operation with the EU-funded Procure2Innovate project.

The ‘Sustainable Procurement of the Year’ recognises outstanding environmental, social and economic impacts of the procurement. The shortlisted candidates are:

• the City of Ottignies, Belgium, for its organic food procurement programme in kindergartens;
• the Region of Brittany, France, for its sustainable reconstruction of a new school building;
• Procura+ participant City of Torres Vedras, Portugal, for its regional campaign to promote sustainable and healthy school meals;
• the Region Pays de la Loire, France, for establishing a local circular economy in the construction sector;
• Kamp C, Flanders, Belgium, for pushing the boundaries in circular construction of office buildings.

In the category ‘Innovation Procurement of the Year’ that recognised outstanding innovation of the procurement and the public authority as a launch customer, the shortlisted candidates are

• the Galician Health Services, Spain, for ground breaking innovations in precision surgery;
• the City of Koprivnica, for launching Croatia’s first innovation partnership to renovate a kindergarten building;
• CONSIP, Italy, for implementing a medical equipment as a service model in hospitals;  
• Procura+ participant City of Malmö, Sweden, for rethinking how ICT equipment can be bought to improve innovation and sustainability along the supply chain.

The candidates shortlisted for the ‘Outstanding Innovation Procurement in ICT’ are:

• the European project PPI4HPC for stimulating cutting edge innovation in high performance computing;
• the Finnish public service agency Sarastia Oy, for brining automation and machine learning to handling invoices;
• the European FABULOS project, for developing the first functional fully-automated public transport services;
• the Austrian public building management agency BIG for its innovation partnership to develop app-based services for smart building management.

The category recognising outstanding processes and actions towards strategic, sustainable and innovation procurement, ‘Procurement Initiative of the Year’, has four shortlisted candidates:

• Procura+ participant City of Copenhagen, Denmark, for systematically developing ecolabelling in procurement together with its suppliers;
• Procura+ participant City of Haarlem, The Netherlands, for collaborating with its contractors to work towards a circular and sustainable city;
• the University of Edinburgh for making use of its research community to implement sustainable and innovation procurement;
• the Austrian federal procurement agency BBG for merging sustainable and innovation procurement competence centres, bringing the levels of services offered to the next level.

This year has seen a record number of high quality applications and we thank every applicants for submitting their entry. We congratulate all shortlisted candidates and all applicants to keep up the good work. ICLEI will announce the finalists in August. Winners will be announced during an Award Ceremony later this year.

Find out more information on the shortlisted candidates here.