Can green public procurement promote renewable transport alternatives in Swedish municipalities?

Many municipalities in Sweden have requirements on green cars in the procurement of municipal vehicles and some also have requirements on electric cars. A newly written report from the project Public procurement as a pol­icy instrument to promote the diffusion and use of renewable transport fuels has looked into the aspects of green public procurement in Malmö and Östersund, two Swedish cities that have come relatively far regarding requirements on electric cars. The project has also compared the procurement of bus traffic in the two regions Skåne and Jämtland and analysed how they use requirements in procurement to introduce renewable fuels in the bus fleet. The overall aim has been to increase the understanding of the challenges with green public procurement and how these have been handled in a few selected cases.

For the empirical material of the study, document studies were combined with semi-structured qualitative interviews with procurers, environ­mental strategists, public transport strategists, politicians and representatives of private transport operators.

Even if the specific cases are unique when in comes to aspects like geography, infrastructure, requirements, etc. some general conclusions and policy inplications could be drawn about what hinders and/or enables the stakeholders to excercise green public procurement successfully. For example, political goals and political backing can be more or less clear, and cooperation and knowledge sharing can be more or less developed and/or utilised.

Jamil Khan, Lund University, has led the project that has been carried out within f3 and Swedish Energy Agency collaborative research program Renewable transportation fuels and systems. Linköping university has also been part of the project.