Surprise. Last night I went into our daughter’s room for our goodnight story and found an explosion of beads and other craft materials. We have asked her to make sure stuff is put away and off the floor before bed many, many, many times. As I stood there about to have the same discussion, I realized she is not committed to a clean room. Sure, we get occasional compliance, and we could even get consistent compliance if we established a clear standard and ecosystem for accountability (regular room inspections and some form of reward system) but that seems a bit military and we could do that on one thing but not on the many things we would like to happen in our family.
What we really want is for her to do it on her own – we want her to have ownership and commitment over making it happen.
I see a lot of similarities as I look at our progress on social and environmental issues. We have commitment gaps. Let’s take for example sustainable procurement. In the last couple of years, I have developed and worked on a number of projects to help advance sustainable procurement at scale. For background, sustainable procurement can be seen as an important intervention point given a number of factors including its size (procurement makes up over 13% of Canada’s GDP[1]), it’s potential for financial efficiency (you are using existing buying power to drive forward existing policy objectives), and its potential to catalyze change in the market (it works to incent integration of sustainability into supplier offerings and operations).
Recognizing this potential, on the environmental side the federal government first started making commitments to advancing green procurement over 25 years ago. In 1992 it committed “to ensuring that environmental considerations would be integrated into government purchasing and policies”[2]. This was followed by a number of subsequent commitments including international commitments on green procurement at the World Summit on Sustainable Development in 2002 and the commitment to implement a green procurement policy in 2005. Most recently, the government made a commitment to reduce the government’s own emissions to 40% below 2005 levels by 2030 and established the Centre for Greening of Government at the Treasury Board that is responsible for advancing this goal, including actions related to procurement[3].
Fast forward to 2020. With the generous support of HP, and in collaboration with Professor Charles Cho and Megan Foley, we recently completed an assessment of the degree of sustainability integration into public sector procurement. We looked at 50 public sector RFPs in the IT, construction and large services category. We found superficial and narrow integration of sustainability into the RFPs. Despite the number of environmental and social issues we have, only 12% of RFPs incorporated sustainability as an independent consideration in the evaluation and no RFPs meaningfully included sustainability as an independent consideration in combination with mechanisms for accountability. In addition, only 20% of RFPs included mention of 3 or more environmental and social considerations.
Why is it that over a 28-year period with various commitments to advancing green procurement, we have made such little progress? I will compare this to the less than 5 years it took from the Task Force on Marijuana Legalization and Regulation’s report to legalization and the less than 18 months it took to move cannabis from illegal substance to essential service.
Like any complex issue, the answer is not simple. There are a number of challenges and the Office of the Auditor General’s 2005 Report of the Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development provides good perspective on a number of these ranging from lack of dedicated staff and limited cross-departmental collaboration to exclusion from key guidance documents and limited use of performance indicators to measure and report on progress.
I believe that at the root of these challenges is a core barrier that is common to a breadth of social and environmental issues; a lack of commitment to holistically driving a desired change, or in this case of advancing sustainable procurement at scale. Now to be clear, I see that there are in fact many commitments to some level of change or to particular components of change. But, at a macro level, I believe we lack commitment to the full scale of change we want. We want change, but we also want to continue to enjoy the benefits from the current state that are in many cases incongruent with the desired change. Or alternatively, we believe we do not have or find the resources we need to drive that level of change.
In this example, I believe we are seeing commitments to particular initiatives that advance sustainable procurement but not to advancing sustainable procurement at scale. This is evidenced by a lack of allocated human and financial resources that prevent sustainable procurement from rising to a level of priority sufficient to enable cross sector collaboration, a comprehensive macro level strategy that is owned, managed, resourced and implemented.
I know that this is a strong statement and I do not make it lightly. I make it after spending significant time and effort digging to understand the root of our snail’s pace on progress. I make it because I have learned over the years and firmly believe that real meaningful progress on any change effort requires understanding and addressing the root challenges to the desired change.
I welcome any challenges to this. If it is not commitment, what is at the root of our meager and inadequate progress?
[1] Clean Energy Canada. The Power of Procurement, Cutting the Federal Government’s Carbon Emissions. 2018. Available online: https://cleanenergycanada.org/report/procurement-federal-emissions/ (accessed on 8 July 2020).
[2] Office of the Auditor General of Canada. 2005 September Report of the Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development. 2005. Available online: http://www.oag-bvg.gc.ca/internet/English/parl_cesd_200509_06_e_14953.html#ch6hd3a (accessed on 8 July 2020).
[3] Clean Energy Canada. The Power of Procurement, Cutting the Federal Government’s Carbon Emissions. 2018. Available online: https://cleanenergycanada.org/report/procurement-federal-emissions/ (accessed on 8 July 2020).