Green Public Procurement as a Leverage for Sustainable Development

The chapter aims to highlight the advantages of GPP practices to address the environmental and economic problems, laying on the experiences of the European countries. The research has the objective to reconstruct the state of the art of green public procurement through the lens of a cross-country comparative analysis at European level. After introducing a systematic review of the literature and the core regulations of the GPP practice, the chapter underlines the results of a multidimensional analysis on a cluster of 80 GPP practices (sample updated to February 2014), identified in European Union and implemented by governments in 25 countries at central, regional, and local government level. The framework of analysis builds on several dimensions, mapping the main results on the following levels: geographic origin, the government level, GPP implementation period, main criteria for implementation, as well as environmental and economic impact of such practices.