Fair Public Procurements

Interfolk was partner in the 9 months mapping project, entitled “Fair Public Procurements”,  2021 - 2022,  supported by Nordic Council of Ministers’ Grant Programme for Nordic-Baltic NGO cooperation.

The partnership circle

The project team consists of four Nordic - Baltic partners, including

• The coordinator: MTÜ Ausamad Riigihanked (EE) (More Honest Public Procurements).

             Viive Aasma, chairperson 

             NB: The organisation has ended its business

• Open Knowledge Finland (FI) - see https://www.okf.fi/

            Tarmo Toikkanen, director

• TOF Norway  (Transforming Our Futures) - see https://www.tofnorway.org/

              Shivcharn Dhillion, Head of Board and Executive Director

•  Interfolk - Civil Society Institute - see https://interfolk.dk/

              Hans Jørgen Vodsgaard, head of institute

Each partner had specific expertises for the project: Estonian More Honest Public Procurements has knowhow about the problems in public procurements. Open Knowledge Finland is expert in open data and transparency, Danish Interfolk is expert in civil society. Norwegian TOR has knowledge about environmental issues and climate change.

Background
It is a trend in public procurements, that instead of asking for only cheapest price, qualitative
evaluation criteria should be also included. These criteria are supposed to make the contracting
party’s choices more environmentally friendly, innovative, and supportive to social values. This
trend is timely, but the more value points are given to qualitative/subjective criteria the more
important it is to have a transparent evaluation process.

Objectives

The general objective of the project is to make public procurements in of higher quality, more
transparent and to reduce the possibilities of corruption and arbitrariness of the contracting
authority. Other goal is to share experiences how to include solid evaluation criteria for
environmental protection, gender equality and other Nordic values into public procurements.

The activities 
The team will select at kick-off meeting five problematic issues in procurements, that they see with general importance in all countries. During the next months they collect data on these topics as well as about qualitative criteria examples used in their countries. Young people help will be used.

The material is then analyzed, similarities in problems and best practices studied. Team will
develop final reports about findings with recommendations for the countries based on the
information gathered. Recommendations include changes in law to make public procurements more transparent and sets of qualitative criteria to be used in public procurements to support Nordic values.

The recommendations will be sent to state agencies involved in law-making. Other
dissemination of results activities will also take place.

The output

The guidelines

• Questionnaires for the surveys, vieve, 1-11-2021

• Extra question from Viive, 17.1.2022

Country surveys

• The Estonian  survey, EN
• The Finnish survey, EN
• The Norwegian survey, EN
• The Danish survey, EN
• The Danish survey, DK

Multilateral Summary Report

• Fair Public Procurements, Nordic-Baltic Summary Report, 30.03.2022