COACH is a three-years EU-funded project which aims at facilitating collaboration between farmers, consumers, local governments and other actors to scale up short agri-food chains which rebalance farmers’ position, create win-wins for producers and consumers and drive innovation in territorial food systems. Besides other activities, the project collects a series of emblematic good practice examples from 12 countries which demonstrate how farmers can access consumer-driven opportunities to improve their incomes and rebalance their position in food chains and creates a ‘living library’. Moreover, COACH designs a ‘farm-to-fork procurement toolkit’ for public authorities in order to improve sharing of experience and help them design appropriate tenders for healthy and fresh food supplied by small-scale producers and also to support farmers to know how to access these opportunities.

As major procurers of food and catering services, public authorities can play a strong role in supporting sustainable production and distribution practices in the sector. By carefully integrating the impact of the food they purchase into procurement decisions, public authorities can significantly contribute to supporting environmental improvements in the sector whilst providing a nutritious diet to beneficiaries and supporting targeted producers. However, there is a lack of overview to which extend procurement can have a sustainable influence at which stage of the food value chain. ICLEI - Local Governments for Sustainability embarks on a new project as part of the UN One Planet Network SPP Programme. The main objective of the project is to provide an overview of procurement along the food value chain and understand how it addresses key hotspots towards shaping the sustainability of food production and consumption.
The ambition is to develop a set of recommendation and case studies written for procurers as well as policy-makers from across the globe, featuring an array of approaches from actors procuring food along the food value chain. In addition, findings and lessons learned will be consolidated in a set of recommendations.

Publication on Public procurement of innovation in Poland in the light of new public procurement law including experiences in acquiring innovations, best practices and more.

The Big Public Buyers Initiative is as a platform for promoting and enabling collaboration between big public buyers on strategic public procurement to help drive the market for innovative goods and services. The main aim of the initiative is to enhance the uptake of strategic public procurement in Europe through partnerships with public buyers. Three working groups will be established, each involving at least three public buyers, focusing on a specific product/sector, where there is a shared public need not sufficiently provided by the current market. The working groups will deliver a tangible outcome such as the development of common procurement standards, the launching of a joint statement of demand, or a joint procurement exercise. ICLEI is running the initiative together with EUROCITIES on behalf of DG Grow.

The European Commission (EC) will produce a report that collects good practices on socially responsible public procurement (SRPP), and ICLEI is are supporting the EC to identify these outstanding examples from local, regional, national and European buyers.
Buying social is about acquiring ethical products and services; using public tenders to promote decent work along the supply chain; introducing gender equality criteria or other social considerations in your tenders; using the light regime for social services, reserved contracts to encourage social outcomes, and accelerating inclusion of people with disabilities by including certain specifications in your tenders, among others.
ICLEI will also support a communication campaign - #WeBuySocialEU - to reach public procurers and authorities to share with them the advantages of SRPP and encourage them to invest time and money on it, and to reach social economy businesses to provide information on the possibilities of SRPP and facilitate their participation in public tendering.

ICLEI is developing an updated version of the EU Commission's Buying Social - a Guide on taking account of social considerations in public procurement

Cleverciti Case Study: Together with Cleverciti, the energy provider RheinEnergie aimed to improve the quality of life in Cologne (Germany) and reduce emissions in the neighborhood by putting in place an innovative parking management system. ClevercitiSen-sors and LED displays, as well as a mobile app, were introduced to provide real-time, turn-by-turn guidance to drivers, helping them find a parking space in less time.

Cleverciti Case Study: The municipality of Kerken (Germany) wanted to provide commuters and train passengers taking a car to the train station with accurate information about the availability of parking spaces before they arrived. A battery-powered solution developed by Cleverciti solved the problematic lack of 24/7 electricity at six of the eight lampposts.

This factsheet provides an overview of the challenges and opportunities facing the transport sector in the context of the global climate emergency. It summarises the innovative actions GLCN cities have taken to address those issues locally through public procurement.