A New Approach to Public Contracting of Sustainable Construction Using Innovation Partnership

Abstract

Sustainable public procurement of construction projects is a key objective to fulfill the targets of the EU Green Deal, the new Regulation approved by the European Parliament, and the conditions required by the Facility of Recovery and Resilience approved by EU. However, most of the adopted procedures are based on traditional procedures, open competition, or restricted procedures, which are not appropriate for developing an innovative approach aiming for more ambitious sustainable objectives. Innovation partnership is a new procedure introduced by the EU Directives of Public Procurement of 2014 ( Article 31º of 2014/24/UE), and it has been discussed and applied to the development of new products but, unfortunately, its potential has not been studied as a tool to prepare and to award more innovative and sustainable contracts of public works. This is the objective of the research presented in this paper, and a set of guidelines is deduced and discussed to support public contracting authorities to make better use of innovation partnerships.