Boes, H and Dorée, A (2011) The development of public procurement at local level in the Netherlands: A longitudinal study. In: Egbu, C and Lou, E C W (eds.) Proceedings of 27th Annual ARCOM Conference, 5-7 September 2011, Bristol, UK.
Abstract
The Netherlands has a long tradition in using the traditional Design Bid Built, lowest price selection procurement. This traditional procurement is often connected to the discourse on poor innovation performance innovation within the construction industry. For over a decade the use of integrated contracts, like design & construct (&maintain) or public private partnerships , is promoted as an important requirement for stimulating innovation. Since The Netherlands Department of Economic Affairs in mid 1990 s stimulates innovation, the use of integrated contracts i.e. the move to innovative procurement (IP) and quality/price selection at national level is widespread adopted, together with a change from invited to more public tendering. Due to this change of policy an organization change was conducted. However, more than 80 % of the total budget of public works is spent by provincial authorities, local municipalities and services boards. They are slower in adopting IP and changing their procurement strategy. In the mid 1990 s the authors developed a survey focused on procurement and client-contractor cooperation at local level. The questionnaire for this research was reused in 2001, 2005 and 2010 to collect data for longitudinal trends. Due to a short time span the 2010 results could not be integrated in this paper. Parallel of this longitudinal study several State of the Art studies were executed to document the development of (innovative) public procurement in general on local level. Also a number of master theses were written on studies related to IP by local authorities. On local level a change of the procurement policy as seen at national level is missing. The use of integrated contracts is incidental, lowest price tendering is still by far favorite and due to that an organization change, more managing and less control, is hardly implemented. Only the amount of public tendering is growing.
| Item Type: | Conference Paper (Paper) |
|---|---|
| Uncontrolled Keywords: | contracts; local authorities; outsourcing; policy; procurement |
| Index terms: | procurement policy, outsourcing, innovation performance, local authority, Netherlands, traditional procurement, procurement strategy, survey, integrated contract, public work, questionnaire, state of the art, construction industry, cooperation, public private partnership, municipality |
| Subjects: | contractual arrangements, psychology, public policy, research dissemination and communication, data collection methods, business, industry analysis, administrative law, sociology, Geography, infrastructure engineering, performance measurement |
| Topics: | Research Practice, Geographical Context, Engineering Principles, Stakeholder Management, Procurement, Governance, Legal Issues, Quality Management, Organizational Design |
| Descriptive scope: | 5 PCTEA |
N.B. Descriptive scope is a count of how many of the five facets of empirical research are indicated by the words used in title, abstract and keywords. It is not intended as a judgement on the research; merely a count of the kind of word we would expect to indicate Phenomenon, Concepts, Theoretical framing, Empirical techniques, Analytical techniques. If all five are present, then a code of “5 PCTEA” will indicate this. If you feel the coding for this record is questionable, we welcome discussion around the terms we matched or the way we categorized them. The facet you would expect may not be coded, or a facet may be coded inappropriately. This can also bear on a larger question, of which facets should be treated as defining in construction management research. Please get in touch, and we will look at it. More details here