Green Public Procurement in academic literature: a survey

The first author’s master thesis (published elsewhere) is a comprehensive literature review of 16 years of academic research on Public Procurement. Here we focus on the literature on Green Public Procurement. The original literature review concerns papers published in English in academic journals covered by Scopus and Web of Science in the 1997-2012 timeframe. Through a rigorous review process we identified 378 publications on Public Procurement in general, out of which 29 were in the area of Green Public Procurement. A first observation is that less than 10% of academic papers on Public Procurement deal with Green Public procurement, so Green Public Procurement can hardly be considered a dominant topic in Public Procurement academic research. But there are more observations to be made. Even though 29 papers is only a limited number to base any comparisons on we find a number of striking differences with the general Public Procurement literature. To mention a few: relatively low percentage of academic papers in typical purchasing and supply management journals, wide spread of authorship and countries studied, relatively low number of citations, no quantitative modelling.