ICLEI Europe is proud to announce the 2024 Procura+ Awards finalists in three categories: Sustainable Procurement of the Year, Innovation Procurement of the Year and Procurement Initiative of the Year. The winners will be revealed on 13 March in a live ceremony at the 2024 Procura+ Conference in Lisbon, where all finalists will receive a free ticket to the Conference.

In the category Sustainable Procurement of the Year the finalists are the Norwegian Central Procurement Body, Greater London Authority and the Dutch Custodial Institution Agency. The Norwegian Central Procurement Body is nominated for developing a framework agreement on the reuse and recycling of used ICT equipment, that also included social requirements for worklife inclusion. Greater London Authority aimed to foster a more inclusive built environment and used sustainability expertise and social value-led design methodologies to procure a framework for commissioning expertise for a range of built environment projects. The Dutch Custodial Institution Agency made a move towards more just food procurement, giving the detainees a key role in the process, setting their diet satisfaction as a minimum requirement, also taking into account environmental factors.

The finalists in the category Innovation Procurement of the Year are the Belgian Agency for Roads and Traffic, Bodø Municipality (Norway) and the City of Malmö (Sweden). The Belgian Agency for Roads and Traffic carried out a competitive dialogue aiming to design, develop and roll out a combination of public C-ITS (Cooperative Intelligent Transport Systems and Services) cloud services, public data sources, and commercial C-ITS applications in the context of the Belgain Mobilidata Programme. The municipality of Bodø launched a call for tenders targeting low-emission solutions, which, once awarded, became the first project in northern Norway to use zero-emission excavators. The City of Malmö aimed to make physical infrastructure, goods and services accessible to people of all ages, sizes and abilities and developed procurement criteria for several tenders based on universal design principles.

Barcelona City Council (Spain), the City of Lisbon (Portugal) and the Lithuanian Public Procurement Office are the finalists in the category Procurement Initiative of the Year. Barcelona City Council developed a responsible public procurement strategy in line with European policies such as the Social Economy Action Plan, in order to facilitate access to public tenders for social economy enterprises. The City of Lisbon developed a Sustainable Procurement Management System, to establish a systematic framework ensuring that all public procurement processes within the Municipality are developed within responsible, transparent, fair, and ecological principles. Lithuania’s aim to reduce its carbon footprint and ensure every public procurement decision considers its environmental impact, led to the creation of the a new sustainability unit within the Lithuanian Public Procurement Office (LPPO) which pushed for the mandatory use of GPP criteria, and supported buyers through training and a helpdesk.

The jury consisting of Jorge Laguna Celis, Director of UNEP's One Planet Network, Jorge Conesa, Managing Director of the Fair Trade Advocacy Office (FTAO), Mark Hidson, Global Director of ICLEI's Sustainable Procurement Centre, and Erika Bozzay, Senior Policy Adviser at the Infrastructure and Public Procurement Division, OECD, will decide on the winners in the coming weeks. The Awards Ceremony at the Procura+ Conference will begin at on 13 March at 18:30. To attend the Conference, register here!

For more information on this year’s finalists, take a look at the Procura+ website. There you will also find more information about previous editions of the Procura+ Awards. In 2023 there were four categories, resulting in the following winners: City of Malmö, Sweden - Circular Procurement of the Year; Ministry of Economic Affairs and Climate Policy of the Netherlands - Innovation Procurement of the Year; City of Utrecht, Netherlands - Sustainable Procurement of the Year; City of Ghent and the VEB, Belgium - Procurement Initiative of the Year