**Winner of the Procura+ Award for Sustainable Procurement of the Year 2018**
Flanders is the Northern federated state of Belgium, with Brussels as its capital. The Government of Flanders has been working on SPP since 2008, when it set a target of 100% SPP by 2020 for its own public procurement. Since 2015, SPP became a part of the overall strategy on procurement of the Government of Flanders (Flemish Plan on Procurement).
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Els Verwimp
Policy contributor
More information? Email procurement@iclei.org
The Government of Flanders has been working on SPP since 2008, when it set the target of 100% SPP by 2020 for its own public procurement. During the period 2009-2015 two action plans were adopted with actions towards this target. Then SPP became a part of an integrated strategy on public procurement.
In January 2016 Flanders adopted a plan for a coordinated policy for public procurement, which included a strategic objective of sustainable and innovative procurement. Other strategic goals are:
The policy for public procurement goal of 100% SPP does not apply to the local authorities within the region of Flanders. However, the Government of Flanders does support local authorities in SPP through opening up its framework agreements where possible and by co-financing the SPP Helpdesk for Local Governments, hosted by the Association of Flemish Cities and Municipalities (VVSG).
The Flemish government approved in July 2008 a first Action Plan on innovation procurement for 2008-2014, which focused on procurement needs that require research and development. A pilot scheme on pre-commercial procurement was launched with a 10 million euro budget to co-finance projects coming from 13 policy domains. The policy domains submitted 48 project proposals out of which 15 were selected.
In October 2016 a new Flemish action plan for innovation procurement was adopted for the period July 2016 to December 2019. The action plan is coordinated by EWI (Flemish ministry of economy, science and innovation) in cooperation with VLAIO (Flemish agency for innovation and entrepreneurship).
The new action plan gives further detail to the strategic objective of sustainable and innovative procurement, including a target to dedicate at least 3% of Flemish public procurement expenditure to innovation procurement. The action plan foresees a starting budget of €5m to kick-start 5 new PCPs and 10 PPIs.
For the most important elements of sustainable public procurement, the Government of Flanders is able to report through its contract management system eDelta on the extent to which the objective has been achieved. Setting up such a system is time-consuming, but finally, from January 2018 on, a core group of organizations within the Government of Flanders has to log the information on all their procurement from €30.000 up in eDelta. The information on sustainability is gathered by no less than 9 different mandatory questions on environmental aspects, social and ethical aspects and innovative procurement, thus taking into account the huge possibilities and differences in real life practice. The questions are:
The contract management system builds on a system that has been in place in the Agency for Roads and Traffic. Furthermore, the Energy and Spatial Development Department did a small scale test on monitoring of SPP from 2012 until 2018 in order to integrate the lessons learned in eDelta (read more on this here .
From 2018 on, the Government of Flanders has focussed on getting everyone on board with the use of eDelta in order to get complete and good data. This is an important step to take before using the data. Now, the Government of Flanders has entered a new stage. It was a deliberate choice to work with 9 questions. This approach gives a lot of information, but also poses a challenge on the question ‘what is a sustainable procurement’. This question will be answered in the next months. The goal of the Government of Flanders is to build a reporting format that allows both to follow up on the % of sustainable procurement and to detect interesting best/new practices within its organization.
Although there is no periodic or fixed reporting on SPP yet, based on limited analyses on the data from eDelta, there are clear indications that the entities of the Government of Flanders have paid a lot of attention to making public procurement more sustainable. This gave a first, more qualitative, insight in the activities of the procurers.
[1] The Government of Flanders uses minimum sustainability criteria for 9 product groups, plus guidance and criteria suggestions on a further 17 product groups.
Flanders Sustainable Public Procurement Policy (Dutch)
Flanders SPP Monitoring Report 2015 (English)
Flanders SPP Monitoring Approach Presentation (English)
Innovation Procurement in Flanders (English)
GPP News Alert: Interview with Els Verwimp (English)
Case study: Monitoring progress towards SPP in Flanders (English)
Case study: Framework agreement for sustainable office supplies (English)
For further information on the activities of Flanders visit their website:
or email procurement@iclei.org