DOI: 10.3217/978-3-85125-842-4-20 179 Monitoring Sustainable Public Procurement Behaviour – Demand-side Analysis of public tenders in Switzerland Tobias Welz 1 , Matthias Stuermer 2 1 University of Bern, Institute of Computer Science, Switzerland, tobias.welz@inf.unibe.ch 2 University of Bern, Institute of Computer Science, Switzerland, matthias.stuermer@inf.unibe.ch Abstract Sustainable procurement requires organizations to align their purchasing behaviour with regard to broader goals linked to resource efficiency, climate change mitigation, social responsibility and other sustainability criteria. As for public procurement activities this means to detect sustainability criteria covered in the awarding stage of a public tender. The main reasons that hinder the inclusion of sustainability in awarding criteria vary from inflexible procedures and attitudes as barriers for innovative approaches, to missing market intelligence about sustainable products. To overcome such obstacles an in-depth-analysis is performed that assesses all procurement sector activities and further monitors sustainable procurement practices within a sector. In a next step, a performance reporting on the level of public authorities is proposed, e.g. to reach targeted ambition level for own procurement strategies or report progress of national sustainable development through public procurement. Doing so, hot-spot supply chain analysis is used to evaluate ecological and social sustainability criteria within a procurement sector as well as to identify corresponding hot spots. For this study the overall sustainability performance is monitored for Swiss public procurement actives in ICT, Construction, Road Transport, Food and Catering as well as for the procurement of Textiles. To this end, more than 102’000 tender data sets are retrieved from the Swiss national procurement platform simap.ch and screened for sustainability criteria using the Common Procurement Vocabulary (CPV) nomenclature to identify relevant procurement projects within a sector. The results reveal to which extent such public tenders include sustainability criteria. Thus, it is possible to monitor procurement behaviour, by identifying market-available sustainability standards and labels, best- practice as well as innovative procurement approaches. This is done by screening tender criteria such as selection criteria (SC), technical specifications (TS) and award criteria (AC). Moreover, it becomes possible to measure sustainability using the MEAT approach, a framework that provides substantial inputs to incorporate sustainability issues for decision-making based on the best price-quality ratio principle. The examination of sustainability performance for public agencies on federal, cantonal or municipal level shows huge differences. This is because as federal agencies usually