Leila Kentache on the ‘Do no significant harm’ principle, the Admission of Women to the Rights of Citizenship, and refocusing on ‘simple’ values

What kind of mind-set is needed to carry out ground-breaking research as we do at UUCePP? UUCePP researchers introduce themselves in brief interviews conducted by Elisabetta Manunza and Fredo Schotanus. 

'Who' and 'what' are you?
My name is Leila Kentache and I am a PhD candidate in Administrative law at the University of Torino, in Italy. I am currently undertaking a visiting semester at Utrecht University, based at the Department of International and European Law and more specifically at the Centre for Public Procurement.

I am currently undertaking a visiting semester at Utrecht University

I started studying EU, international, and comparative law at the University of Trento, surrounded by the Alps of the North-East of Italy. After the three-year Bachelor's there and an Erasmus semester in Austria, I decided to explore the other side of the Italian Alps, so I moved to Torino. This is where I continued studying the EU legal order and its peculiarities, concluding this step with a dissertation on access to justice in environmental matters written between the Universities of Torino and Maastricht. The Master’s thesis was my first approach to researching EU administrative law and its interplay with environmental law.

Before embarking on the PhD adventure, I was a trainee at the European Ombudsman Office in Brussels, where I contributed to the Office’s inquiries into EU institutions’ administrative activities and gained experience in investigating maladministration practices in this realm. This experience raised my awareness of EU administrative activities and their potential flaws, equipping me with a more comprehensive and real idea on EU institutions.

Following my experience in Brussels, I felt motivated to delve into a specific area of EU law relevant to the protection and preservation of the environment. This ended up being EU public procurement law and its potential to drive towards a sustainable future if properly integrated with green considerations.

So far, what I value the most about being an early-stage researcher at the university is the opportunity to go home every day having learned something new. I enjoy engaging with open-minded people with whom I can discuss diverse ideas and perspectives.

What are you working on, and why?
My PhD project focuses on the application of the novel EU ‘Do no significant harm’ principle throughout the Recovery and Resilience Facility procurements. This principle was first defined in EU law in its attempts to provide a Taxonomy to classify sustainable economic activities. Under the Recovery and Resilience Facility framework, it was imposed as a mandatory condition for Member States to obtain these EU funds. Therefore, my research involves insights from both public procurement law and EU environmental law, and how they can come together.

My academic studies have always focused on the EU legal order, and, through the doctoral programme, I decided to explore how we can effectively and practically address environmental concerns using existing legal tools such as public procurement.

Public procurement as a driver for 'green' policy objectives

The EU is a constantly evolving legal system that importantly impacts both our daily lives and legal orders. One instance of this is the unprecedented financial resources that the Union is allocating to Member States in their recovery from the COVID-19 crisis. In this regard, my research aims at understanding how such economic recovery, and the reforms and investments occurring in its realm, can be an opportunity to also secure more comprehensive environmental protection. As the role of public procurement as a policy tool has evolved importantly in the last few years, I find it relevant to investigate its potential in these times of dynamic changes.

I hope that, through my project, I will be able to provide an example of how public procurement law can be a means - and probably a driver - for fostering certain policy objectives, particularly green ones, even in times of dynamic changes. Studying law made me aware of the fact that most of the loopholes hindering its objectives fall in the enforcement phases, at the execution level of concrete projects. So despite the need to improve coherent enforcement throughout the EU, discussions often highlight pragmatic obstacles such as the insufficient training of public buyers to face a change, or the belief that issuing new rules would, in any case, not change much at the end of the day.

As local administrations are often the actuators of key EU environmental laws, I think that, through academic research, it is important to observe their activities and reflect on how they could be improved. This is why I am glad to research in this field of law: it gives me the opportunity to have the bigger picture - from the high ambitions of the EU Green Deal to the difficulties that a public buyer might face when setting up a public procurement procedure. At the same time, the biggest challenge of my project lies exactly in this aspect: to be able to explore public procurement law in its interplay with the “do no significant harm” principle as enshrined in EU Taxonomy in a comprehensive and meaningful way.

For all of these reasons, my research stay at Utrecht University is a great occasion to learn about how things are done in the Netherlands in this field of research and practice and to explore how I could bring some insights back to my home country.

Our world seems to be in a continuous state of various crises: can you indicate for one (or possibly several) of these crises how this affects your research?
If I had to choose among one of the many crises our society is undergoing, that would be the climate crisis. This is the crisis that personally worries me the most and probably the one for which I see the most tangible effects around me and in the news. As our society is responsible for its massive impact on the environment, I believe our role is key to addressing it.

Aspiring for 'the cheapest option' is no longer tenable

The environmental crisis affects my research in public procurement law because its urgency changed the cards on the table of public interests: the idea that the only and main priority of public administrations is to aspire for the cheapest option available on the market is obsolete. Public procurement activities are characterized by the constant research of a balance between different - and often conflicting - interests. Therefore, the impelling climate crisis that we are experiencing calls for a reconsideration of the priorities, also in a traditional field such as the one of administrative law*, which has an important potential in integrating environmental concerns in its various and different procedures. [*Contrary to the Netherlands, in Italy public procurement regulation falls under administrative law.] EU law plays a key role in this balancing activity, as it sets the policy objectives and main priorities that Member States and their administrations shall respect at the various levels of the legal order. 

Because of the complexity of this balance among priorities, I believe our research becomes key for the actors present in the various legal orders to take more informed and reasoned decisions in the field of public procurement law.

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Name your greatest ambition or your best dream (or both)?
I am constantly looking for a balance between, on the one hand, spending time outdoors observing nature and, on the other, working at the desk. This is a picture I took while hiking in the national park of Gran Paradiso, which reminds me of the immense value we shall protect: if you look closely at the horizon, you unearth an Alpine ibex, a protected species that is preserved in this park. It is for this reason that my greatest ambition is to have a life that allows me to do both things: I would love my work to be meaningful for preserving the environment and helping as many people as possible through it, but I also would like to be able to experience its beauty and never stop learning from it. Therefore, as it happens for public procurement, my personal ambition is to find the balance between different interests.

We should not lose track of 'simple' values

"On a more general level, my best dream is to see a society which is fairer and based on deeper values than what we are often experiencing today. Especially in the times of multiple crises we are living, I often feel that we are somehow losing track of simple values such as justice, humanity, kindness, mainly because these are not measurable in economic value. I hope European society as a whole and the lawmakers will be able not to walk away from these and realise that financial development is not the only and most important goal. Inspiring is the approach taken by UUCePP researcher in developing a new concept of ‘economy’."

"In this regard, I recall a quote which is stuck in my mind – pronounced by Marquis de Condorcet, a French thinker from the times of the French revolution, in his essay “On the Admission of Women to the Rights of Citizenship”, in France (1790):

“Custom may familiarize mankind with the extent, that even among those who have violation of their natural rights to such and lost or been deprived of these rights, no one thinks of reclaiming them, or is even conscious that they have suffered any injustice. Certain of these violations have escaped the notice of philosophers and legislators (…).”

I agree with his idea on the danger of becoming accustomed to certain rights’ violation and I think that, as researchers, we should continue questioning what is around us and advocating for what we believe is just – even where it becomes uncomfortable."