Public Purchasing, Political Priorities, and the Promise of AI
Public procurement is often treated as an administrative function: governments identify what they need, solicit bids, and award contracts based on price, quality, and delivery time. These purchasing decisions, however, have strategic consequences far beyond budgets and supply rooms. When governments account for carbon emissions, labor conditions, business ownership, and community impacts in purchasing decisions, procurement can become a powerful instrument for advancing climate and social goals. Yet new research involving SPA Professor Nicole Darnall shows the difficulty in turning that promise into practice.
Darnall is coauthor on three recent studies examining these challenges from different angles. A piece in the International Journal of Operations and Production Management identifies how public organizations balance economic efficiency against sustainability goals. Another, in Frontiers in Sustainability, explores the political barriers limiting digital innovation in sustainable procurement; a second piece in the same journal considers how artificial intelligence could help procurement officials manage increasingly complex decisions, while introducing new concerns about fairness, transparency, and governance.
Together, the research presents sustainable public procurement––defined by Darnall as the embedding of environmental and social criteria into the purchasing process––as both an enormous opportunity and a demanding institutional challenge.
Why Sustainable Procurement Matters
“Sustainable procurement can mean accounting for carbon emissions, purchasing from minority- or women-owned businesses, supporting small/local firms, or examining whether workers throughout a supply chain receive fair wages,” Darnall explained. “The objective is to determine the broader value created by public spending rather than judging purchases solely by their immediate financial cost.”
The scale of that spending gives governments unusual influence: the U.S. federal government spends approximately $700 billion on goods and services annually. If it could direct even a fraction of that spend to products with social value, outcomes (e.g., child labor and unequal access to public contracts) could improve worldwide.
“Not only could you improve the way our society connects with those goods and services, you could also raise the bar for production across the globe, even in places with much weaker regulations than the United States,” she said.
Darnall described the origins of her work in this relatively new field as the collaborative search for a problem that combined sustainability, public policy, management, and organizational research.
“[Our research team] wanted to find a project related to sustainability, that drew on every one of our strengths but could not be done individually; a project with enormous sustainability promise and impact that no one was paying attention to at the time,” she said.
Her project work has since expanded across local, state, and national governments and abroad, with research collaborations involving Japan, Spain, Mexico, Australia, Italy, the Czech Republic, and Slovenia. Darnall has also partnered with the United Nations on its Sustainable Public Procurement Global Review.
Sustainable Procurement and the Environmental and Social Stakes
While public agencies can use their purchasing power to reward suppliers that forward positive environmental, economic, and social outcomes, this requires consideration of more variables than traditional purchasing systems were designed to handle. Adding sustainability criteria makes the process more data-intensive and introduces competing objectives. Officials may need to consider a product’s carbon footprint, the source of its materials, labor conditions, and the impact of its production over its entire life cycle.
Darnall emphasized that procurement is particularly important in addressing emissions. For companies producing goods, she said, procurement accounts for up to 96% of their carbon emissions; direct operations and energy use account for just 4%. These so-called “Scope 3 emissions,” or those that occur across the supply and distribution chain, are crucial.
“If we are truly serious about our global climate commitments, we have to rip off that Band-Aid and think critically about what we procure, where it comes from, and its impacts,” she said.
The social stakes are similarly large, with more than 20 million people working in conditions of modern slavery worldwide. Procurement requirements, she said, can help governments identify and eliminate abusive labor practices from supply chains.
Public purchasing can also support economic inclusion, although current outcomes fall short of stated goals. Darnall said that approximately 40% of federal contracts are eligible for bids from small minority- and women-owned businesses, but those businesses receive just 15%.
Addressing Tensions in Economic Efficiency and Sustainability
In “Addressing Economic Efficiency–Sustainability Tensions in Public Procurement Decision-making: Unpacking the Role of Decision Framings,” Darnall’s research team used decision frameworks to examine how 10 public organizations respond to tradeoffs between three competing approaches: cost-driven (rational, prioritizes economic efficiency), values-driven (prioritizes public value and sustainability), and ambidextrous (attempts to hold both perspectives at the same time).
In practice, sustainable procurement rarely involves a perfect solution. A product may be inexpensive but carry a significant environmental burden. A supplier may offer strong labor protections but face limitations in price. Digital tools could help procurement officials gather and interpret the information required for those decisions. However, political priorities often determine their adoption.
In a related study, discussed below, Darnall and her co-authors compared sustainable procurement leaders in state and local government with those beginning to develop their sustainable procurement practices, expecting more advanced governments to be using more sophisticated technologies. Instead, they found little difference.
“Even the leaders who are using these technologies to help manage the complexity may not be doing it well,” Darnall said. “Or they may lack the advanced tools that are out there to facilitate this process.”
The Role of Political Gatekeeping
The authors provide one explanation for this deficiency in “Political Gatekeeping and Digital Innovation in Sustainable Public Procurement.” Procurement offices compete for attention and resources with services that are more visible to the public and produce more immediate political consequences. Police and fire departments, for example, may receive priority because voters directly connect their services with public safety. Procurement and sustainability operate on longer time horizons. Their effects may include reduced emissions, improved labor conditions, and stronger markets for smaller businesses, but those outcomes are less visible during election cycles.
“In order for local governments and state governments to adopt technologies within their organization, they compete with technology needs in the fire department or emergency services,” Darnall said. “They also compete with the police department. Crime reduction is a very obvious service. The sustainability of the procurement process is much more nascent.”
The research concludes that political support may function as a gatekeeper for other factors, including organizational capacity, internal processes, and technology framing. Without political backing, even governments with experience and resources may struggle to adopt tools that could accelerate sustainable procurement.
Sustainable Procurement and AI
Artificial intelligence could alter that equation. “Leveraging AI for Sustainable Public Procurement: Opportunities and Challenges” examines how AI might support the entire procurement lifecycle, from defining needs and assessing markets to issuing tenders, evaluating suppliers, and improving future practices. In principle, such systems could make it easier to compare suppliers, estimate life-cycle impacts, and connect high-level climate commitments to specific purchasing decisions.
But the technology also raises serious questions. Public agencies must consider whether AI systems are transparent, secure, and fair. Further, AI-assisted decisions could affect competition among suppliers, access for smaller contractors, and public confidence.
“There’s a lot of concern about data privacy, how they function, and security,” she said. “Additionally, communities worry about data centers’ high use of water and energy, and broader community impacts related to noise, displacement of farmland, and air quality.”
Darnall said future work will examine how data centers can develop more sustainable practices. The goal, she said, is to connect technological innovation with the same environmental and social accountability that sustainable procurement demands from other industries.
For now, the research points to a central lesson: better tools alone will not transform public procurement. Governments also need political support, institutional capacity, clear decision frameworks, and reliable data.
Public procurement’s influence is already vast. The question is whether governments can use that influence to measure value broadly enough, and act decisively enough, to make sustainability more than an aspiration.