Incorporation of Environmental Criteria in the Tendering Process: Moving Towards Green Public Procurement in Bhutan

Abstract

Green Public Procurement (GPP) is considered an important tool to mitigate adverse environmental impacts. The mitigation can be achieved via e.g., environmental performance improvement, consumption of natural resources reduction, and market motivation towards the green product with innovation. Royal Government of Bhutan (RGoB) spent approximately 60-70% of its annual budget on procurement of goods, services, and works alone. Also, Bhutan imports excessively as a result of the absence of manufacturing industries. In moving towards sustainable procurement, the current GPP adopted by RGoB can be improved. Thus, this study aims to improve the current GPP by developing environmental criteria of office supplies and providing recommendations on how the key environmental criteria can be incorporated in the tendering process of the Government Procurement and Property Management Division (GPPMD), Ministry of Finance (MoF), RGoB. The descriptive research analysis was adopted to assess the extent of environmental criteria adopted in the tendering process. The majority of the respondents agreed on having some understanding and knowledge of environmental criteria on procurement of goods. The results indicated that there were rules and policies that existed to address environmental aspects in the tendering process. However, the majority of the respondents have agreed on its importance to have an Act and rules with the list of qualified environmentally friendly products. The maximum respondents reported the main GPP obstacles were the “lack of training for public procurement officers” and “lack of knowledge in developing environmental criteria”. Based on the literature review of 43 peer-reviewed journal articles; the environmental criteria were identified and categorized, these criteria were then duly validated by the experts. The list of prioritized environmental criteria for procurement of office supplies was acquired by Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP). Four experts as representatives from the government organization and non-governmental organization were interviewed to prioritize the environmental criteria. The comprehensive literature was conducted to derive the main criteria and sub-criteria in the procurement of goods. The top three ranks of environmental sub-criteria obtained from AHP were “use of recycled materials”, “recyclable packages”, and “emission to water & air”, respectively. A future study can be conducted mainly towards finding out more strategies towards implementing the applicable environmental criteria considering the absence of manufacturing industries in Bhutan. Awareness-raising and training initiative should be conducted for all the procurement personnel. The training can be in terms of green criteria, legal documents, and inclusion of the environmental criteria in the tendering process. The outcome can aid in understanding the current practice of tendering process and in implementing a more practical GPP with the adoption of environmental criteria.

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