Abstract
AbstractAnalysing the environmental actorness of the EU, more than one voice has spoken of the myth of a Green Europe and a dismantling process of its environmental ambitions. To date, any attempt to quantify this in a homogeneous fashion by different levels of government and institutions has run into serious difficulties. This research, however, uses green public procurement (GPP) as the research instrument to quantify the commitment to environmental policies. We construct the database from tenders published in the Supplement to the Official Journal between 2009 and 2019. Based on more than 743,061 observations, the article finds that the EU's institutions have the lowest GPP adoption rates in relation to all other levels of government. Moreover, it also records marked differences between the EU institutions where the European Parliament is performing better than the European Commission and, during Juncker Commission, EC performs worse.
Highlights
The President of the European Commission (EC), Ursula Von der Leyen, has placed green policies firmly on her political agenda for Europe over the five years (EuropeanCommission, 2019), and the ‘European Green Deal’ is at the top of it
This article has sought to disentangle this myth of a Green Europe by examining the degree of green public procurement practiced by its institutions
Our point of departure in this discussion has been that EU institutions are not front-runners when it comes to implementing Green Public Procurement (GPP)
Summary
The President of the European Commission (EC), Ursula Von der Leyen, has placed green policies firmly on her political agenda for Europe over the five years (EuropeanCommission, 2019), and the ‘European Green Deal’ is at the top of it. The President of the European Commission (EC), Ursula Von der Leyen, has placed green policies firmly on her political agenda for Europe over the five years It can be argued that the President is seeking to sustain the myth of a ‘Green Europe’, a narrative that has helped the EU over the years to gain support and build a common identity and create solidarity among its peoples The EU has developed an extensive body of environmental policies by which it seeks to shape the way Member States address environmental affairs. As pointed out by Torney (2019), the implementation and convergence of environmental policy remain a challenge, even though the gap between leaders and laggards has been reduced. In a similar vein, Gravey and Jordan (2016) considered whether EU environmental policies might be subject to ‘dismantling’, a process that might lead to a stalling or even a reversal of its environmental ambitions (Gravey and Jordan, 2016; Steinebach and Knill, 2017)
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