Sustainability is everywhere. Yes, including in procurement

When people think of sustainability, they rarely think about procurement. They think of climate policy, clean energy, recycling, forests or electric vehicles. They do not usually think of tenders, technical specifications, evaluation criteria, or the everyday purchasing decisions made by local governments.

But for Zeljka Vidovic, Sustainability Public Procurement Analyst with UNDP Bosnia and Herzegovina, procurement is exactly where sustainability can become practical.

Local governments buy goods and services every day: computers, furniture, vehicles, equipment and infrastructure. Each tender is a decision about public value. It can reward the cheapest option only, or it can encourage better standards: energy efficiency, responsible sourcing, reduced emissions, electronic waste management, gender responsiveness and inclusion.

The challenge is that this connection is not always obvious.

For Zeljka, working with municipalities meant helping decision-makers understand why sustainability belongs in procurement in the first place. Before she could make that case to others, she had to sharpen it for herself: how do the Sustainable Development Goals connect to procurement rules, municipal budgets and the way public authorities buy goods and services?

That is where the Digital4Sustainability Learning Path, developed by UNEP and UNSSC with partners, became useful.

The shift: understanding sustainability as a procurement choice

The learning path explores how digital technologies can support environmental and social sustainability, while also examining the environmental risks of digital transformation itself. Across four self-paced modules, participants look at digital transformation for sustainable development, climate action, biodiversity action and pollution action.

For Zeljka, the course helped reframe digitalization. 

That question became directly relevant a few months later, when she began working on the Building Efficient and Transparent Local Public Finance System in Bosnia and Herzegovina project.

The project, financed by the Ministry of Finance of the Slovak Republic, works with 10 partner local governments to strengthen public finance management and support more efficient and transparent local systems, in line with the country’s SDG commitments and relevant European Union requirements. One of its intervention areas focuses on green and gender-responsive public procurement, helping local authorities integrate sustainability, gender equality and inclusion into procurement processes.

The course did not give Zeljka a ready-made answer for every procurement challenge. But it gave her a framework and language to connect technical decisions with sustainability outcomes.

What changed in practice

Zeljka’s team is now supporting the design of a pilot project that integrates sustainability criteria into public procurement.

This includes questions that may seem small but can have real cumulative impact. When a municipality buys computers, what happens to the electronic waste? When it buys furniture, can the materials be responsibly sourced? When public authorities purchase vehicles, can they consider hybrid or electric options to reduce emissions?

The project is also developing guidelines to help local governments apply green and gender-responsive criteria in tenders. For Zeljka, this is where learning moves into practice: helping municipalities understand that procurement is not only an administrative process, but a lever for sustainable development.

“Public procurement is a large share of countries’ spending,” she noted. Public authorities, she added, can be “a leader of change” by embedding sustainability into existing policies and procedures and showing that they really care, or they could go about doing business-as-usual.

Why it matters

The impact is not that one course transformed a procurement system overnight. The change is more practical and more credible: it helped one practitioner connect sustainability, digitalization and procurement clearly enough to apply that thinking in a live project with local governments.

That matters because procurement is where many public commitments either become real or stay on paper.

If sustainability is built into tenders, guidelines and municipal purchasing decisions, it begins to shape markets, suppliers and public spending. It helps local governments use their purchasing power not only to buy goods and services, but to advance environmental and social goals.

For UNDP Bosnia and Herzegovina, this strengthens the bridge between global commitments and local implementation. The SDGs become more concrete when a municipality drafting a tender asks whether a product is energy efficient, whether waste will be managed responsibly, whether procurement criteria support inclusion, and whether public money is being used in line with long-term sustainable development.

That is the value of the Digital4Sustainability Learning Path. It helped make the connection visible.

Sustainability is not only in environmental projects. It is not only in climate strategies. It is also in the everyday systems that determine how institutions spend, decide and deliver.

Including procurement.