Public procurement is no longer just about buying goods and services at the lowest price. Public tenders should contribute to Europe’s resilience, innovation, competitiveness and political and economic security. This shift was at the centre of the recent Big Buyers Working Together annual event where concrete examples from across Europe showed how procurement decisions increasingly affect how public authorities work, what services they deliver and how quickly they can respond to major challenges.
For cities, public procurement has become one of the strongest tools to shape markets in line with public goals delivering climate action, social inclusion and innovation. In line with these developments The European Commission is currently preparing a revision of its public procurement framework, established in 2014, that will seek to with the aim to strengthen the strategic role of public procurement in EU policy making
Procurement as a strategic tool
In the City of Oslo, public procurement is a key lever for climate action. The city spends more than €3 billion each year on goods, services and investments, from construction sites and transport to schools and water systems. How that money is spent matters.
“Public procurement is among our strongest tools for climate action,” says Espen Nicolaysen, Head of sustainable procurement at the City of Oslo. Through systematic demand, clear goals and standardised requirements, we have learned that this purchasing power can shape entire markets.”
By demanding zero‑emission solutions in construction and transport, Oslo helped create demand where little existed. Since 2020, the city has delivered more than 200 zero‑emission construction projects. From January 2025, all municipal construction sites must be zero emission, and last year around 94% of public construction projects were already electrified.
In Madrid, procurement plays a different but equally strategic role. The city’s digital transformation strategy, Madrid Digital Capital, uses procurement to align innovation, governance and public services across a large administration of 20,000 employees.
“This is not about technology,” explains Marta Cruz, advisor at Madrid City Council. “It is about governance, coordination, collaboration and public procurement.”
Madrid has introduced a common contract structure for digital projects, with mandatory work packages on areas such as artificial intelligence, co‑creation with citizens and capacity building. This gives suppliers clarity and helps the city ensure that innovation supports wider public goals. It also encourages collaboration between companies, as no single provider can deliver everything alone.
Rising costs, climate targets, social expectations and rapid technological change all converge at the point where public money meets the market. This focus on procurement comes at a decisive moment at EU level, as the European Commission prepares a revision of the Public Procurement Directive.
Henning Ehrenstein, Head of Unit for Public Procurement at DG GROW, stresses that implementation on the ground must go hand in hand with legislation. “One thing is the law that is made here in Brussels. The other thing is how it is applied in practice: learning from each other, sharing experiences, and seeing what actually works and what does not,” he said.
For the Commission, initiatives that connect public buyers across Europe are therefore essential. They help bridge the gap between policy ambition and day‑to‑day procurement decisions.
Legal uncertainty standing in the way
Despite these growing ambition, the event emphasised that strategic public procurement can still be challening to deliver in practice. One of the most persistent barriers is legal uncertainty. Even when EU rules allow the use of environmental and social criteria, many public buyers remain cautious.
As Lois Pimentel Iglesias from DG GROW points out, this uncertainty has not disappeared with time: “Even ten years after the 2014 directives, there are still cases before the Court of Justice asking whether certain social considerations are allowed. That shows how much legal uncertainty remains.”
This uncertainty often pushes authorities towards price‑only criteria, not because they are preferred, but because they are perceived as safer.
A second challenge is capacity and time pressure. Even where political ambition is high, procurement teams often work under tight deadlines and with limited resources. In practice, this makes it difficult to redesign tenders from scratch. Cities further highlighted the difficulty of balancing ambition with market access, especially for small and medium‑sized enterprises.
Another recurring obstacle is contract management. Setting ambitious criteria at the tender stage is only the beginning; ensuring they are delivered over the life of the contract is often where things break down.
“You can put sustainability criteria in the tender, but then it’s in the hands of the internal client. As a procurer, it’s not always easy to follow up,” shares Veerle Labeeuw from Circular Flanders, describing cases where sustainability ambitions were later overruled by auditors or cost considerations, undermining the original objectives.
Finally, buyers pointed to the challenge of fragmentation: across departments, levels of government and legal frameworks. Without shared standards and clearer guidance, public buyers are left to navigate complex and sometimes conflicting expectations on their own.
Collaboration as the multiplier
Public buyers repeatedly pointed to cooperation a real accelerator of change. Through Big Buyers Working Together, for instance, they are building knowledge together across different procurement areas and learning how to apply it in each own’s local context.
For example, Lukas Sloet from the City of Amsterdam described how early work in the solar panel community of practice focused on detailed guidelines and templates. But participants quickly realised that these were hard to use in practice across different administrations.
“Everyone has their own documents, their own templates and their own ways of working,” he said. This insight led to the development of a more user‑friendly online guide that allows buyers to select sustainability criteria and compare manufacturers.
Another strong learning point was the value of cross‑cutting collaboration. Many challenges, such as forced labour risks or circularity, do not sit neatly within one procurement category.
Buyers highlighted how joint work between the solar, ICT and social procurement communities, including shared hackathons, helped break down silos and avoid duplicating efforts. As City of Oslo’s Kjersti Koffeld noted, “We are not going to move forward if we are not able to stop working in silos and move forward jointly on these issues.”.
In this sense, Big Buyers Working Together functions as a collective learning space helping public buyers move faster, reduce risk and turn individual successes into shared progress.
Looking ahead: what buyers want from EU procurement rules
For many public buyers, the upcoming revision of the EU Public Procurement Directive will determine whether strategic procurement becomes standard practice.
Public buyers that are already pushing boundaries want reassurance that they can continue to do so.
“There is still uncertainty about how far we can go,” said Nicolaysen.“We need to trust that this is legal, that this is okay, so we can push markets even further.” For buyers like Oslo, clarity is about giving procurement teams the confidence to act without fear of legal challenge. Other buyers highlighted that lowest‑price criteria are often used because they feel safer, called for greater coherence between procurement rules, warned that overlapping frameworks can create confusion rather than clarity and emphasised the need to support collaboration and replication, rather than leaving each authority to innovate alone.
Ehrenstein outlined three overarching priorities guiding the Commission’s work:
- making procurement a more effective public investment tool through simplification and legal coherence
- strengthening digitalisation, including interoperable procurement platforms
- enabling more strategic procurement, particularly on environmental and social objectives
He emphasised that digitalisation is not a technical add‑on, but a precondition for making simplification and strategic procurement work in practice. Without better data and interoperable systems, he warned, “we have nice rules, but they remain hollow.”
In the end, the stakeholders that participated in the event concluded on a clear point: the revised Public Procurement Directive should remain a horizontal framework focused on how to buy, while making it easier, safer and more coherent for public buyers to use procurement strategically — and to do so consistently across Europe.
For cities, the message looking ahead is clear. Public procurement is already delivering results on the ground — from zero‑emission construction to digital innovation. The next step is ensuring that EU rules enable more cities to act with confidence, consistency and speed, turning individual success stories into shared European progress.
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