Call for Papers: Can Public Procrement Law Do It All?

The challenge is no longer simply whether public procurement may be used to pursue policy objectives, but how an increasingly wide range of legal objectives can coexist within a coherent and effective legal framework. Objectives may reinforce one another, but they may also compete. Circular requirements may lead to more expensive purchases in the short term and have benefits in the long-term, thereby creating a trade-off with short-term efficiency objectives. Resilience and (economic) security can call for greater supply diversification, but requirements addressing strategic dependencies may also raise costs or restrict competition in tenders, even if such considerations may be necessary on a global scale. Social or environmental requirements may affect market access, but increase quality and benefit climate targets. Innovation may require flexibility and mechanisms that sit uneasily with legal certainty, equal treatment or transparency. And more. 

How, then, should EU public procurement law respond when individually legitimate policy objectives pull in different directions? What trade-offs exist? Does the legal framework provide public buyers with sufficient guidance to identify, balance and prioritise competing objectives? How should ‘new’ broader objectives interact with ‘older’ objectives related to competition, value for money and the principles of equal treatment, transparency and proportionality? And at what point does the accumulation of policy ambitions risk undermining legal certainty and ultimately the effectiveness of public procurement law itself? 

The conference invites contributions that critically examine these questions and the changing role of EU public procurement law. We particularly welcome papers that move beyond examining individual strategic objectives in isolation and instead consider their interaction and possible trade-offs.

Possible themes include:

• Conflict and synergies: Legal conflicts or trade-offs that arise when procurement procedures are required to pursue divergent objectives, whether by different legislative instruments or by a single instrument such as the proposed Public Procurement Act; Legal synergies and tensions between environmental, circular, social, innovation, industrial, security and resilience objectives; What really is ‘strategic’?            
  
  
• Coherence: Reflections on internal coherence of the public procurement directives or on the proposal for a Public Procurement Act; The nexus between environmental, innovation, and resilience and economic security objectives; Conceptual work on coherence within the EU public procurement framework or between public procurement law and other EU regulatory regimes, including the interaction between procurement rules, State aid, and sectoral measures supporting innovation or strategic supply capacity;
• Mechanisms of reconciliation and prioritisation: The legal principles or mechanisms through which competing procurement objectives can or should be reconciled; Whether and how certain objectives should or can be prioritized in EU law;
• Effectiveness: The relationship between strategic procurement, competition and value for money, and its effectiveness; The implications of increasingly mandatory sectoral and horizontal EU legislation for the coherence of public procurement law, and the balance with discretion for public buyers; Circular public procurement as a test case for managing multiple and potentially competing objectives; And more broadly whether the expanding strategic role of procurement strengthens or undermines the effectiveness, accessibility and enforceability of the legal framework.

Contributions may adopt doctrinal, theoretical, comparative, empirical or interdisciplinary approaches. All contributions must have a strong tie to EU public procurement law, but comparative and international perspectives that illuminate the European debate are also welcome.

The conference will be paper-based, with draft papers circulated among participants in advance to facilitate substantive discussion. A selection of contributions will be considered for publication in a special issue in European Papers, subject to the journal’s usual editorial and peer-review procedures.