The deadline for submission of ICLEI’s Procura+ Awards has been extended to 30 April to give public authorities more time to prepare their applications. The Global Initiative of the Year category is now open to submissions from outside of Europe for the first time, and it has led to responses from four different continents. Don’t miss your chance to participate by filling in the application form here.

The submissions this year will be assessed by a jury of four procurement experts and policy makers:

• Katrin Stjernfeldt Jammeh, Mayor of Malmö and ICLEI president
• Mark Hidson, Global Director, ICLEI’s Sustainable Procurement Capacity Center
• Erika Bozzay, Acting Deputy Head at the Infrastructure and Public Procurement Division, OECD
• Jorge Laguna Celis, Director of UNEP's One Planet Network

As the Mayor of Malmö is one of the jury members, the City of Malmö can’t submit an application and will not be able to repeat its successes from 2022 and 2024, when it won respectively in the categories of Circular Procurement of the Year and Innovation Procurement of the Year.

Other previous winners such as ICLEI members the City of Lisbon (Portugal), the City of Utrecht (the Netherlands), the City of Ghent (Belgium) and the City of Copenhagen (Denmark) are more than welcome to submit some of their successful procurements. They can do so in the following three categories:

• Sustainable Procurement of the Year: This category will reward procurements which integrate aspects of sustainability, including environmental, economic, circular and social elements. It aims to showcase procurements which include a strategic and therefore holistic approach to implementing public procurement.
• Innovation Procurement of the Year: This category will reward those procurements which use innovative approaches in their purchasing practices, as well as those that foster innovation by purchasing cutting-edge products, services and works and see the public authority as a launch customer, driving sustainable development.
• Global Initiative of the Year: For the first time public authorities from all over the world can submit an application for the Procura+ Awards. This category goes beyond Europe and seeks to showcase good practices globally. It will focus on global outstanding public procurement initiatives, such as programmes, policies, actions, guidance and tools that contribute towards strategic, sustainable, circular and innovation procurement.

The Procura+ Awards are an ICLEI Europe initiative giving visibility to the most dynamic, forward-looking and innovative public authorities. They are seeking to highlight public procurement initiatives with a strong potential for replication and scaling up, serving as an excellent showcase for using sustainable, circular and innovation procurement instruments to purchase cutting edge solutions.

More information can be found here. To find out more about what information the submissions need to include, take a look at the skeleton form. Please note that applications will only be accepted if submitted through the official application form. 

The Awards will be given out during the Procura+ Seminar in Middelburg (the Netherlands), hosted by the Province of Zeeland from 8-9 October 2025.