Report on Best Practice

The background to this report is a research project named “Green innovations in construction – investigating the regulatory space for sustainable solutions in the construction sector”, funded by the Swedish Foundation for Humanities and Social Sciences in collaboration with Skanska Sweden AB and in affiliation with Sociology of Law Department, Lund University, in a postdoctoral research project called Flexit. There are two main purposes of the project. One is to investigate sustainability norms in the regulatory space of the construction sector in order to generate knowledge about the values influencing private and public actors in terms of environmental consequences of their decisions. Another purpose of the project is to investigate ecologically sustainable innovation processes within the construction sector, examine how they function and how they can be steered or influenced. The findings point at several interesting aspects of sustainable public procurement practice in Sweden. Although the findings must be weighed against the small number of organisations interviewed and lack of replies in some instances, the findings represent the viewpoints of those at the forefront of sustainable public procurement in Sweden over a number of years. This report will for that reason paint the picture of some of the ingredients to proactive and successful sustainable public procurement.