Stewardship and administrative capacity in green public procurement in the Czech Republic: Evidence from a large-N survey

Plaček, Michal et al. Article — Published Version Stewardship and administrative capacity in green public procurement in the Czech Republic: Evidence from a largeN survey Environmental Sciences Europe Provided in Cooperation with: Leibniz Institute of Agricultural Development in Transition Economies (IAMO), Halle (Saale) Suggested Citation: Plaček, Michal et al. (2021) : Stewardship and administrative capacity in green public procurement in the Czech Republic: Evidence from a large-N survey, Environmental Sciences Europe, ISSN 2190-4715, Springer, Berlin, Vol. 33, https://doi.org/10.1186/s12302-021-00534-7 This Version is available at: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/237114 Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen: Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden. 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Environ Sci Eur (2021) 33:94 https://doi.org/10.1186/s12302-021-00534-7 RESEARCH Stewardship andadministrative capacity ingreen public procurement intheCzech Republic: evidence fromalarge-N survey Michal Plaček1,5* , Vladislav Valentinov2, Cristina del Campo3, Gabriela Vaceková4,5, František Ochrana1 and Markéta Šumpíková5 Abstract Background: The uptake of green public procurement in the Czech Republic is known to lag behind the European standards. We trace this condition back to the adverse effects of a specific type of decision-making trade-off faced by the Czech public procurement officials, namely the trade-off between stewardship and administrative compliance. The trade-off means that public procurers are aware of administrative risks and complications attendant on the conscientious non-perfunctory implementation of green public procurement. Results: The overall result is that public procurers ultimately come to prioritize the contract criterion of the lowest price over ecological criteria. The existence of this trade-off has been generally confirmed by the results of a unique large-N survey of more than 1100 respondents from a group of local public officials and mayors in the Czech Republic. Conclusion: We have found that the decision-making of Czech public procurers is affected by the trade-off between stewardship and administrative compliance, which turn out to be mutually conflicting goals. On the one hand, many public procurers do possess a stewardship motivation that shapes their positive attitude to GPP. On the other hand, they are painfully aware of, and seek to forestall, administrative risks and complications attendant on the conscientious, i.e., non-perfunctory, implementation of GPP. Keywords: Green public procurement, Stewardship, Administrative capacity, Large-N survey, Czech Republic © The Author(s) 2021. 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Background In this paper, we examine the implications of the trade-off between stewardship and administrative compliance in green public procurement by drawing on a unique largeN survey of more than 1100 respondents from a group of local government officials and mayors in the Czech Republic. The statistical analysis of the data confirms the existence of the trade-off. The results obtained are important not only for theory, but also for public policymaking. The results suggest the administrative barriers to GPP arise from the formalistic attitudes toward GPP and are particularly acute in decentralized governance settings. Thus, policy-makers must be made responsible for overcoming these barriers to GPP, as well as for stimulating a deeper systemic change aimed at restoring the potential of stewardship. The public procurement expenditure of the EU states exceeds 19% of their GDP, which amounts to about 2.3 trillion Euro annually [55]. In view of its tremendous economic proportions, public procurement is widely recognized as a potentially important tool for implementing the EU Circular Economy Action Plan. However, the effectiveness of this tool depends on the extent to which the classic public procurement model is converted into Open Access *Correspondence: [email protected] 1 Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic Full list of author information is available at the end of the article Page 2 of 19 Plačeketal. Environ Sci Eur (2021) 33:94 the green public procurement (GPP) model, which may be understood as “a process whereby public authorities seek to procure goods, services and works with a reduced environmental impact throughout their life cycle when compared to goods, services and works with the same primary function that would otherwise be procured” [3, 47]. Drawing on the analysis of the EU’s Europe 2020 Strategy and Renewed Sustainable Development Strategy ([79], p. 1) note that GPP presents “an essential marketbased instrument for attaining the EU’s economic and environmental objectives.” Yet, the significance of GPP within public procurement varies widely across Europe. According to Yu etal. [79], GPP accounts for 21.81% of the total procurement value, and green contracts accounts for 9.49% of all contracts’ volume. The highest uptake of GPP is characteristic of countries with a long history of EU membership, such as Denmark, Belgium, France, and Ireland. In contrast, the role of GPP remains relatively insignificant in the Czech Republic. This country’s GPP is currently limited to about 2% of GDP, with the share of green contracts being less than 5% of the total public procurement value [79]. In an EU-wide comparison of the uptake of GPP, the Czech Republic lags far behind. The present paper inquires into the possible causes of this situation. Much of the current GPP scholarship foregrounds a variety of decision-making trade-offs that influence the uptake of GPP across institutional settings. The most fundamental trade-off faced by procurers and policy-makers is probably the one between economic and sustainability goals [56]. Gelderman etal. [20] discuss further trade-offs occurring between complexity, procurers’ risk aversion, political relationships and green public procurement goals. The significance of these trade-offs seems largely confirmed by Yu etal. [79] recent empirical study of the public procurement of 33 EU states in 2018. The authors found that green contracts tended to be associated with large contract value and less open procedures, implying negotiations with competitors. Thus, green procurement projects turned out to be more complex than conventional ones. Following Sönnichsen and Clement [65], a key part of this complexity can be taken to arise from the decision-makers’ need for the awareness and knowledge of circular public procurement attributes, as specified in the circular policy and strategy documents. The key contention of the present paper is that the relatively poor track record of GPP in the Czech Republic can be traced back to yet another variety of the decisionmaking trade-offs faced by public procurement officials. This is the trade-off between individual stewardship and compliance with the administrative setting. This trade-off posits that, in the Czech Republic, administrative compliance tends to be achieved at the cost of stewardship, thus resulting in the low overall rates of GPP uptake. A key conceptual source for identifying this trade-off is stewardship theory [33] which argues that public procurers are honest rather than selfish and are genuinely interested in achieving societal goals. If they act as stewards, public procurers seek intrinsic intangible rewards such as “opportunities for growth, affiliation and self-actualization” ([31], p. 960), but are hindered by undesirable properties of administrative systems. These properties may pertain, e.g., to information asymmetries, lack of administrative capacities, and problematic aspects of decentralization. These administrative hindrances may turn public procurers into “honest incompetent actors” [31]. Over time, however, stewardship turns out to be irreconcilable with the lack of competence and gives way to the formalistic and bureaucratic attitude well-described by the expression “check-the-box-mentality” [48]. In the public procurement literature, the problems of stewardship have been widely acknowledged in areas as diverse as the Covid recovery [26], social investment, and military procurement [17]. Stewardship, administrative compliance, andtrade‑offs inGPP: exploring theconceptual foundations Decision-making about GPP at the coal face of public administration practice entails trading off the criterion of lowest price against other criteria related to ecological sustainability [56]. The ability to bring this fundamental trade-off to fruition is tantamount to high GPP performance. The implementation of GPP is, however, widely recognized to be challenging, especially at local levels [14, 65]. One of the crucial obstacles on the way to high GPP performance is the lack of the adequate resource base of municipalities [57]. Wang et al. [75], p. 292, explain that the key types of the required resources are material, information, and social capital, no less important are ethics and professionalism of the individual public procurers, as well as the availability of the sufficient working capacity (ibid). The impact of the resource provisioning of public authorities on GPP performance has been the subject of extensive scholarship that has emphasized the importance of capacity, training, and moral commitment of public procurers [14, 40, 57]. In view of the importance of resource provisioning, Rosell [57] hypothesizes that richer countries are more likely to exhibit superior GPP performance, interestingly, within these countries, better GPP performance was observed within larger and richer municipalities [37, 41]. One option of fulfilling the considerable resource requirements of high GPP performance is promoting the collaboration of stakeholders, such as policy-makers, users, buyers, vendors [75], Page 3 of 19 Plačeketal. Environ Sci Eur (2021) 33:94 p. 292). While stakeholders may exert pressure on local authorities to engage in GPP, they may also supply some of the resources needed by local authorities for this purpose [32, 57]. What is remarkable about the current state of the art of GPP scholarship is that the resolution and adjudication of the fundamental trade-off between the criteria of the lowest price and ecological sustainability is supposed to depend on the quality of stakeholders collaboration. This supposition seems to go against the grain of stakeholder theory which pays considerable attention to trade-offs between stakeholder interests but is nevertheless conflicted about the matter [49]. Understanding business as “a set of value-creating relationships among groups that have a legitimate interest in the activities and outcomes of the firm” (ibid., p. 3), stakeholder theory has recommended managers to create “as much value as possible for stakeholders, without resorting to trade-offs” [18], p. 28). The obvious problem with this advice is that some trade-offs may turn out to be difficult to avoid or overcome [24]. If so, trade-offs may well present “a key puzzle for stakeholder theorists” [21], p. 30. In a similar fashion, Crilly [13], p. 251 concedes that “from the view of stakeholder theory, one of the most complex problems facing organizations concerns how to address multiple, potentially conflicting, stakeholder demands”. The upshot is that for stakeholder theorists, stakeholder collaboration is about overcoming the trade-offs, and transforming managerial mindsets in such a way that trade-offs turn out to be “more apparent than real” [19], p. 213. While the economic, social, and ecological pillars of sustainable development may not always mesh perfectly and thus give rise to trade-offs, stakeholder theory recommends to employ business models which transform these trade-offs into win–win potentials [63]. Thus, stakeholder theory seems to be far from believing that high sustainability performance, such as the one achievable through GPP, necessitates the deliberate sacrifice of the criteria of the lowest price in favor of those of ecological sustainability. One possible explanation for the thought-provoking divergence between GPP scholarship and stakeholder theory is that the former appears to implicitly rely on a specific understanding of trade-offs that can be reconstructed along systems-theoretic lines. It is noteworthy that today’s commentators on Niklas Luhmann’s social systems theory speak of the complexity–sustainability trade-off giving expression to the radical precariousness of the relationship of social systems to their environment [44, 70]. According to Valentinov [70], p. 14, the complexity–sustainability “trade-off emerges because the growing systemic complexity entails the increasing risk that systems develop insensitivity to those environmental conditions on which they critically depend”. Valentinov (ibid) derives this trade-off by juxtaposing Luhmann’s [39] ideas on systemic closure with Bertalanffy’s [74] theory of open systems. On Luhmann’s view, closure of social systems is conditioned by their main function of complexity reduction, summarizing these ideas, Valentinov (ibid, p. 18) speaks of the “complexity reduction principle”, according to which “systems increase their complexity by becoming increasingly insensitive to the complexity of the environment”. Summarizing Bertalanffy’s [74] conception of systemic metabolism, Valentinov (ibid) introduces “the critical dependence principle” which “posits that the increasing complexity of systems is associated with their growing dependence on environmental complexity”. Considered together, these two principles suggest that social systems may gain sustainability at the cost of sacrificing some intra-systemic complexity which can be fully unfolded only if the complexity-reducing function holds full sway. For systems such as corporations or economy as a whole, the complexity–sustainability trade-off captures the key challenge of balancing the economic, social, and ecological pillars of sustainable development [58, 69]. For these systems, realizing the trade-off basically means aligning the principles of complexity reduction and critical dependence in such a way as to remain in a sustainable state. Moreover, as shown by Valentinov etal. [73], this systems-theoretic argument is not at all alien to stakeholder theory. As shown by the authors, the meaning of stakeholder management can be found precisely in aligning the complexity reduction and critical dependence aspects of corporate operations. What is, however, noteworthy in the GPP context is that this alignment crucially depends on the resource provisioning of specific local authorities, as well as on the prevalent moral climate. Systems-theoretic approaches to the theory of the firm suggest that the alignment of complexity reduction and critical dependence aspects necessitates trust, loyalty, commitment, and goodwill. Similar requirements are posed by the task of the development of competence and capabilities [62, 68]. In the GPP context, these requirements translate into the importance of stewardship which underpins the genuine commitment of individual public procurers to the cause of ecological sustainability [33]. If Luhmann [39] is right to locate the main function of social systems in complexity reduction occurring in the amoral (not immoral!) fashion, then stewardship may be rightly perceived as a rare asset which can by no means be taken for granted. Moreover, Valentinov and Perez Valls [72] envision the possibility that the very complexity-reducing function, foundational in the modern society as it is, may promote the formation of reductionist Page 4 of 19 Plačeketal. Environ Sci Eur (2021) 33:94 mindsets which have been explicitly criticized by stakeholder theory [18]. In the corporate context, such mindsets predispose managers to selfish behaviors. In the GPP context, such mindsets indicate the predominant concern of public procurers with administrative compliance and minimization of risks, this concern would likely result in the unwillingness of individual decision-makers to trade the criterion of the lowest price against other criteria related to ecological sustainability. If the systemic function of complexity reduction indeed promotes reductionist mindsets which make decision-makers insensitive to the ecological repercussions of their actions, then stakeholder collaboration as well as high GPP performance may be difficult, if not impossible, to achieve in practice. At this point, the current state of the art of GPP scholarship holds the potential to illuminate at least some of the prerequisites of the successful realization of the trade-off between the economic and ecological components of sustainability [56], or more generally speaking, the complexity–sustainability trade-off [70]. These prerequisites encompass the adequate resource provisioning of local authorities and specifically their knowledgeability about the meaning and procedures of GPP [57, 75]. It is clear that the decision-making by local public procurers, just like managerial decision-making in general, entails an appreciable share of what Barnard [5] famously called “non-logical thought processes”, including hunches, gut feelings, intuition, and other forms of subtle judgment [72]. Given that these processes are hardly thinkable apart from stewardship behaviors, we argue that the “non-logical thought processes” on the part of individual public procurers reflect the stock of the available knowledge about the meaning and procedures of GPP within the respective local authorities [57, 75]. The empirically testable implication of this argument is that public procurers acting in the resource-constrained contexts will be unable to exercise judgment and discrimination required for the successful realization of the trade-off between the economic and ecological components of sustainability. In the following sections, this implication is more firmly anchored within the Czech institutional context of GPP as well as within the empirical GPP scholarship. Czech Republic institutional context andresearch questions The Public Procurement Act plays a key role. This law has an interesting history and development. In its historical trajectory it is possible to see the development of the GPP concept in the Czech Republic. The first Public Procurement Act in the Czech Republic was adopted in 1995 [10] (the Czech Republic was established in 1993). The drafters of this law had no experience in creating this regulation for public procurement and the actors of public procurement had no experience with the public procurement agenda. This law was therefore marred by imperfections and it has been frequently amended. The reasons for these amendments were basically threefold: (1) efforts to improve the law and the competitive environment (e.g., an anti-corruption amendment to increase transparency in public procurement); (2) correcting emerging imperfections in the law (e.g., one amendment removed a blockage in the procurement procedure); (3) responding to dynamic changes in the environment. The category "responding to dynamic changes in the environment" includes the GPP concept. A significant milestone in the development (history) of the Public Procurement Act was in 2001 when the Czech Republic was preparing to join the EU. In 2004, a new law transposing the European procurement directives was published. This law came into force in 2006 and was in force until 2016. The law was again frequently amended due to similar reasons to those from the previous period. The Czech Republic’s EU membership became a new impetus for GPP implementation. EU public procurement directives (Directive 2014/EU) seek to ensure greater inclusion of common societal goals in the procurement process. These goals include environmental protection, social responsibility, innovation, climate change actions, employment, public health and other social and environmental considerations. However, the adoption (implementation) of the GPP concept in the Czech Republic has been very slow and gradual. It was a reaction to the (im)mature institutional environment in the Czech Republic. The Law on Public Procurement (2006) left it up to the contracting authority to decide how to conduct public procurement. It established two basic types of criteria—the lowest bid price and multi-criteria evaluation (the so-called economic advantage of the bid). The economic viability of a tender could have different sub-criteria. Furthermore, the environmental criterion has been rarely used. The lowest tender price criterion was preferred. Until 2016, over 80% of public contracts were evaluated according to the lowest tender price criterion. This was a vestige of the past. Environmental protection was not a priority in the former Czechoslovakia, nor in the Czech Republic. The new Public Procurement Act [9] initiated the change strengthening the principles of GPP as a direct response to Directive 2014/EU. For the first time, the Public Procurement Act contains a separate section on GPP as it explicitly mentions "social, environmental or innovative aspects" as one of the quality criteria. A significant change is brought by the latest amendment to the Public Procurement Act (1 January 2021). The contracting authority is obliged to take into account Page 5 of 19 Plačeketal. Environ Sci Eur (2021) 33:94 the environmental impact, sustainable development, the life cycle of the public contract and other environmental impacts of the public contract. This is a significant change in the adoption of GPP. The government has issued several methodologies to promote GPP. The new law (incorporating GPP ideas) opens new chances (new window of opportunity) to implement the "green agenda" in public procurement. However, to implement the green agenda, appropriate policy adoption is needed, both for agenda setting and decision-making [28], 2017). However, the GPP problem is influenced by multiple factors (see [57] including (in addition to the aforementioned public procurement law): related standards and instruments, accompanying and supporting instruments, environmental education, training and awareness. Related standards play an important role for GPP and shaping the relationship to environmental sustainability. These standards and tools are used to support the setting of environmental criteria. They can be subdivided, for example, into signal behavior norms, norming, and awareness and educational tools. An overview of the most commonly used standards and tools in the Czech Republic is given in Table1: The point of departure for deriving our research questions is the study by Plaček etal. [51], who found significant differences in the efficiency of public service provision among Czech municipalities. The key finding of the authors is that the smaller municipalities perform worse than bigger ones, for reasons related to economies of scale, limited municipal fiscal capacity, and the effects of grant funding (ibid). Crucially for the present paper, Plaček etal. [51] show that the role of stewardship is systematically weakened by fiscal illusion, low public involvement and rational inattention of voters. These results are broadly in line with the current scholarship exploring the relationship between decentralization and the performance of local governments. This relationship can be generally taken to depend on information asymmetry, rational ignorance and rational abstention [6, 23], bureaucratic behavior [1], competition among municipalities [67], fiscal illusion [6], intergovernmental grants and transfers [7], and municipality size [15]. A similarly precarious relationship between stewardship and administrative capacity is likewise suggested by recent research into the capacity of local governments in the Czech Republic to implement new managerial tools or policies. Several studies have found the efficiency of local governments to remain unaffected by the adoption of management tools supported by funds from the EU such as benchmarking, CAF, ISO, and national excellence policy [52, 53]. The authors take these findings to be indicative of a number of administrative problems, including a predominantly ceremonial and formalistic approach to the implementation of public policies, and purely verbal commitment to reforms on the part of local policy-makers (ibid). In view of the lack of support from and control by the central government, local governments focus on the formal, perfunctory fulfillment of EU funding requirements (ibid). The significance of these problems is further confirmed by a recent comparative study of the EU states exhibiting low GDP performance [50, 54]. Drawing on a uniquely large sample of public procurement in 11 Central and Eastern European countries, the study employed hierarchical regression to analyze factors influencing the types of public contracts (ibid). The authors found that institutional factors such as the level of administrative decentralization, quality of governance and corruption climate have a greater impact on overpricing than individual decisions by the contracting authority. Again, the emerging pattern is that stewardship considerations, which could potentially inform these decisions, turn out to be trumped by administrative bottlenecks. In the light of these studies, we can formulate several more specific conjectures about how the trade-off between stewardship and administrative compliance plays out in the decentralized governance context of the Czech Republic. Drawing on the insight that education, information, and awareness are the most important factors of individual acceptance of GPP [22, 36, 45], we consider stewardship behaviors to be more likely forthcoming from public officials with experience in the area of GPP and who exhibit a high degree of genuine acceptance of GPP. We hypothesize, however, that these officials will tend to be concentrated in bigger municipalities, which have specialized buying departments and are able to deliver appropriate information and training for their staff. We are skeptical whether these advantages would be equally possible in smaller municipalities, which often face more severe fiscal stress while having weaker administrative capacities. Table 1 Standards and tools used to support GP. Source: authors on the basis of European Union [8] and websites of Czech Ministry of Environment, Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs, Ministry of Regional Development Name of the standard/tool Specification ECOLABEL EU Ecolabel. It is being introduced into the national standards of the Czech Republic Certificates E.g., the certificate on fluorinated greenhouse gases Testimonials E.g., certificate of exclusion of hazardous properties of waste Standards Technical standards included in the tender documentation Page 6 of 19 Plačeketal. Environ Sci Eur (2021) 33:94 At the same time, in line with the trade-off logic, we consider the GPP experience of public officials to result in their intimate familiarity with the bureaucratic requirements of the Czech public procurement system. Reacting to these requirements, public officials would tend to adjust their GPP decision-making in such a way as to minimize the risks of administrative complications and the attendant administrative transaction costs. In practice, this means that over time, the GPP decisionmaking will come to prioritize evaluation criteria based on the lowest price rather than adequate ecological sustainability impact. This interpretation of the meaning of experience accords with Gelderman etal. [20] argument that in public service, risk aversion considerations may come to trump enthusiastic and honest effort to achieve societal goals. This interpretation thus yields a valuable contribution to scholarship underlining the importance of experience for the governance of particularly complex projects [12], for enabling positive learning and sunk cost asymmetries [30], and for the evolution of long-term procurer–supplier relationships [66]. Based on the arguments above we formulate the following research questions: 1. Is municipality size positively associated with GPP experience and acceptance on the part of local public officials? 2. Is previous experience with GPP associated with declining enthusiasm about it on the part of local public officials? Methods anddata Our data come from a unique large-N survey, which took place during summer 2020. The survey was carried out with the help of an electronic questionnaire that was sent out to the official email addresses of all Czech municipalities, accompanied by a cover letter. The target respondents group comprised persons in charge of green public procurement implementation, a designation that is not specified precisely in the documentation of many organizations. Thus, respondents included politicians at the level of mayors or vice-mayors, as well as upper echelon bureaucrats at the level of department head. The exact position of respondents also depended on the size of municipalities. Having approached 6,248 municipalities, we obtained 1,117 responses (a response rate of 17.88%), with a majority of males (799 respondents, 71.53%) and with both functions within municipalities represented (842–75.38% politicians, 223–19.96% civil servants, 52–4.66% blank responses). In terms of population, the size of the respondents’ municipalities varied from 29 inhabitants to approximately 290,000, with an average of 3,036.222 (standard deviation 13,474.46) and a median value of 557. The questionnaire included seven questions dealing with respondents’ attitude towards green procurement. The authors formulated the questions themselves. Six questions employed a Likert-type scale offering a range of five answers from “absolutely disagree” to “absolutely agree”. One question had the binary form of yes/no and another allowed the selection of an option. We also asked respondents to provide information about the size category of their municipality. The crucial part of the questionnaire included questions asking respondents to indicate their level of agreement with statements reflecting the trade-offs affecting green procurement. These trade-offs took account of the possibilities of a preference for the lowest price, of the risk of a higher probability of an appeal to the Office for Protection of Competition, and a preference for particular contract criteria. The structure of the questionnaire is explained in Table2. Pearson’s Chi-square test of independence (referred to here simply as the Chi-square test) is one of the most useful and commonly used statistics for answering questions about the association between categorical variables, such as in the present case. However, while the Chi-square test describes that association between independent (categorical) variables, its value alone is unable to describe the strength of the association between them, given that its value is largely dependent on sample size, which likewise influences whether or not a significant association exists between the variables. The strength of the association between such variables can be explored and described with the help of Cramer’s V, which varies between zero and one without any negative values. Cramer’s Vis similar to Pearson’s r, in that a value close to zero means no association. Furthermore, a value higher than 0.25 indicates a very strong relationship [2]. Finally, as Chi-square test is not accurate with small sample sizes, Fisher’s exact test (referred here simply as the Fisher’s test) will be used to prove the nonrandom associations between two categorical variables in the case of small samples. It has to be noted that even though in practice Fisher’s test is employed when sample sizes are small, it is valid for all sample sizes. We have only used correlations and this decision may have had an impact on our findings as correlation does not imply causation because that correlation might come from a common cause. However, it tends to give a clue on the causation. Hence, further research will be needed to be able to prove the cause for the decisions on GPP. Page 7 of 19 Plačeketal. Environ Sci Eur (2021) 33:94 Table 2 Structure of questionnaire. Source: authors No. of question Wording Possible answers Type of question 1 Do you have experience in awarding public contracts with ecological (or environmental) criteria? Yes/no 2 It is socially useful to award ‘green public contracts’, i.e., contracts taking into account environmental criteria Absolutely disagree, somewhat disagree, do not know, somewhat agree, absolutely agree Personal attitude towards green public procurement 3 I am in favor of awarding public contracts that take into account the environmental criteria Absolutely disagree, somewhat disagree, do not know, somewhat agree, absolutely agree Personal attitude towards green public procurement 4 Personally, I would prefer to announce a tender for a cheaper contract (without environmental requirements) before awarding a more expensive public contract with environmental criteria Absolutely disagree, somewhat disagree, do not know, somewhat agree, absolutely agree Trade-off between stewardship and bureaucratic accountability rules 5 If I have information that a public contract with an environmental criterion increases the risk probability of an appeal to the Office for Protection of Competition, then I will clearly prefer the public contract without environmental criteria Absolutely disagree, somewhat disagree, do not know, somewhat agree, absolutely agree Trade-off between stewardship and bureaucratic accountability rules 6 If the contract has the following evaluation criteria: “employment criterion”, “criterion of the support for local companies”, and “criterion of ecological impact of public procurement on the environment”, then I will always (or mostly) consider “criterion of ecological impact” as most important Absolutely disagree, somewhat disagree, do not know, somewhat agree, absolutely agree Trade-off between stewardship and bureaucratic accountability rules 7 If I wanted to include a criterion of ecological impact on the environment in the contract, then I would classify it as a general obligation of the supplier under the contract Absolutely disagree, somewhat disagree, do not know, somewhat agree, absolutely agree Trade-off between stewardship and bureaucratic accountability rules 8 Size category of municipality Up to 500 inhabitants, between 501 and 999, between 1000 and 9,999, between 10,000 and 49,999, 50,000 and more Page 8 of 19 Plačeketal. Environ Sci Eur (2021) 33:94 Results Research question 1: Is the size of municipality positively associated with GPP experience and acceptance on the part of local public officials? As it has already been mentioned, a total of 1,117 valid questionnaires were obtained. In terms of population, the size of the respondents’ municipalities varied from 29 inhabitants to approximately 290,000, with an average of 3,036.222 (standard deviation 13,474.46) and a median value of 557. Table 3 indicates that larger municipalities seem to have a higher likelihood of having experience with awarding public contracts with ecological (or environmental) criteria. Furthermore, there is a clear association between municipality size and respondents’ experience with awarding public contracts with ecological (or environmental) criteria (Chi-squared = 36.672, df = 4, p-value = 0.0000002104). Moreover, Cramer’s V test (V = 0.1811935) shows that the association between the two variables is strong. Table4 shows the degree of respondents’ agreement with specific statements offered in the questionnaire. For all sizes of municipalities, and for most questions, respondents most often chose the option “somewhat agree”, with “do not know” being the second-most popular option. Respondents are more divided over the statement, “If the contract has the following evaluation criteria: ‘employment’, ‘support for local companies’, and ‘ecological impact of public procurement on the environment’, then I will always (or primarily) consider ‘ecological impact’ as the most important criterion of public procurement.” Here, the most common answers encompass “somewhat disagree”, “do not know”, and “somewhat agree.” The Chi-squared test statistic p-value is larger than the significance level of 0.05 for only one statement, namely, “If the contract has the following evaluation criteria: ‘employment criterion’, ‘criterion support for local companies’, and ‘criterion of ecological impact of public procurement on the environment’, then I will always (or primarily) consider ‘criterion of ecological impact’.”. This allows the rejection of the null hypothesis for all remaining statements, and the conclusion on this basis that respondents’ answers are associated with the size of the municipalities. However, these associations are mostly weak (smaller than 0.10), with the only exception being the statement, “If I have information that a public contract with an environmental criterion increases the risk probability of an appeal to the Office for Protection of Competition, then I will clearly prefer the public contract without environmental criterion.” For this statement, the association of respondents’ reactions with municipality size is moderate (larger than 0.05). As politicians and civil servants may have different views on GPP we decided to repeat the previous analysis for each of both groups separately. Tables of the detailed results can be found in Appendix B. Table7 indicates that only civil servants from the biggest cities answered the survey, and those seem to have a higher likelihood of having experience with awarding public contracts with ecological (or environmental) criteria. In all the other cases, the percentage of people without that experience seems to be higher. Furthermore, there is a clear association between municipality size and respondents’ experience in awarding public contracts with ecological (or environmental) criteria for both groups (Politicians: Fisher’s exact test p-value = 0.002084, Civil servants; Fisher’s exact test p-value < 0.00001). Tables8 and 9 show the degree of respondents’ agreement with specific statements offered in the questionnaire separately for both groups. For all sizes of municipalities, and for most questions, Politician respondents most often chose the option “somewhat agree”, with “do not know” being the second-most popular option. However, Civil servants responses are more divided between the options “somewhat disagree”, “do not know”, and “somewhat agree”. Tables8 and 9 also show the Fisher’s exact test p-values. For Politicians, there are three items whose p-value is smaller than 0.05 (in bold in TableA2 meaning that respondents’ answers are associated with the size of the municipalities. There are another two with p-value smaller than 0.1 meaning that association is weak. In the case of Civil servants, there are also three items whose p-value is smaller than 0.05 (in bold in TableA3 meaning that respondents’ answers are associated with the size of the municipalities. However only in item “If I have information that a public contract with an environmental criterion increases the risk probability of appealing to the Office for Protection of Competition, then I will clearly prefer the public contract without environmental criterion” is the association significative in both groups. Table 3 Experience with GPP according to municipality size. Source: authors Municipality size category Q1—Experience in awarding public contracts with ecological (or environmental) criteria No Yes Count 50,000 and more 37.5 62.5 16 10,000–49,999 53.7 46.3 41 1000–9999 67.7 32.3 300 501–999 72.7 27.3 238 Up to 500 80.3 19.7 522 Page 15 of 19 Plačeketal. Environ Sci Eur (2021) 33:94 Table 7 Answers to Q1 question by size category of municipality and function of respondents Size category of municipality Q1—Experience of awarding public contracts with ecological (or environmental) criteria Politicians Civil servants Total count No Yes Count No Yes Count 50,000 and more 0 0 0 33.3 66.7 15 16 10,000–49,999 50 50 6 53.1 46.9 32 41 1000–9999 67.3 32.7 196 67.7 32.3 93 300 501–999 72.0 28.0 211 89.5 10.5 19 238 Up to 500 79.7 20.3 429 89.1 10.9 64 522 Table 8 Survey questions response percentages by size of municipality for Politicians Bold values are statistically significant Questions Answer Size of municipality Fisher’s Exact Test Up to 500 501–999 1000–9999 10,000–49,999 50,000 and more It is socially useful to award ’green public contracts’, i.e., contracts which they have in evaluation criteria include an environmental criterion Absolutely disagree 2.1 1.4 1.5 16.7 0 0.2509 Somewhat disagree 6.8 6.6 7.7 0 0 Do not know 44.8 41.7 39.3 0 0 Somewhat agree 39.2 42.7 43.4 50 0 Absolutely agree 7.2 7.6 8.2 33.3 0 I am in favor of awarding public contracts that take into account the environmental criterion Absolutely disagree 1.9 1.4 0.5 0 0 0.07596 Somewhat disagree 4 2.8 1.5 0 0 Do not know 36.4 40.8 28.6 16.7 0 Somewhat agree 45 41.7 54.6 33.3 0 Absolutely agree 12.8 13.3 14.8 50 0 Personally, I would prefer to announce a tender for a cheaper contract (without environmental requirements) before awarding a more expensive public contract with environmental characteristics Absolutely disagree 2.8 1.4 2.6 0 0 0.04348 Somewhat disagree 15.2 20.9 25 50 0 Do not know 25.6 28.9 28.6 0 0 Somewhat agree 44.5 38.4 36.7 33.3 0 Absolutely agree 11.9 10.4 7.1 16.7 0 If I have information that a public contract with an environmental criterion increases the risk probability of appealing to the Office for Protection of Competition, then I will clearly prefer the public contract without environmental criterion Absolutely disagree 2.3 1.4 3.1 0 0 0.009995 Somewhat disagree 8.4 5.2 9.7 33.3 0 Do not know 28.7 19 19.8 0 0 Somewhat agree 38.5 50.7 38.8 33.3 0 Absolutely agree 22.1 23.7 28.6 33.3 0 If the contract has the following evaluation criteria: "employment criterion", "criterion support for local companies" and "criterion of ecological impact of public procurement on the environment", then I will always (or mostly) consider "criterion of ecological impact" as the most important criterion of public procurement Absolutely disagree 3.7 2.8 2 16.7 0 0.3188 Somewhat disagree 24 28 29.1 16.7 0 Do not know 29.8 27.5 32.7 50 0 Somewhat agree 33.3 34.1 32.1 16.7 0 Absolutely agree 9.2 7.6 4.1 0 0 If I would like to include in the contract a criterion of ecological impact on the environment, then I would classify it as a general obligation of the supplier under the contract Absolutely disagree 1.2 1.4 1 0 0 0.06297 Somewhat disagree 5.4 5.2 4.6 33.3 0 Do not know 22.6 19.9 24.5 16.7 0 Somewhat agree 57.1 53.6 61.2 33.3 0 Absolutely agree 13.7 19.9 8.7 16.7 0 Page 16 of 19 Plačeketal. Environ Sci Eur (2021) 33:94 Table 9 Survey questions response percentages by size of municipality for Civil Servants Bold values are statistically significant Questions Answer Size of municipality Fisher’s Exact Test Up to 500 501–999 1000–9999 10,000–49,999 50,000 and more It is socially useful to award ’green public contracts’, i.e., contracts which they have in evaluation criteria include an environmental criterion Absolutely disagree 0 0 0 0 6.7 0.006497 Somewhat disagree 4.7 5.3 7.5 15.6 20 Do not know 59.4 52.6 36.6 28.1 13.3 Somewhat agree 29.7 31.6 48.4 46.9 33.3 Absolutely agree 6.2 10.5 7.5 9.4 26.7 I am in favor of awarding public contracts that take into account the environmental criterion Absolutely disagree 0 5.3 1.1 0 0 0.01749 Somewhat disagree 1.6 5.3 5.4 6.2 20 Do not know 50 42.1 23.7 21.9 20 Somewhat agree 37.5 42.1 54.7 46.9 40 Absolutely agree 10.9 5.3 15.1 25 20 Personally, I would prefer to announce a tender for a cheaper contract (without environmental requirements) before awarding a more expensive public contract with environmental characteristics Absolutely disagree 0003.1 0 0.4093 Somewhat disagree 25 36.8 34.4 40.6 33.3 Do not know 40.6 47.4 33.3 18.8 20 Somewhat agree 25 10.5 23.7 31.2 40 Absolutely agree 9.4 5.3 8.6 6.2 6.7 If I have information that a public contract with an environmental criterion increases the risk probability of appealing to the Office for Protection of Competition, then I will clearly prefer the public contract without environmental criterion Absolutely disagree 0 0 1.1 9.4 20 0.0009995 Somewhat disagree 6.2 5.3 10.8 15.6 6.7 Do not know 42.3 47.4 26.8 9.4 6.7 Somewhat agree 40.6 36.8 43 37.5 33.3 Absolutely agree 10.9 10.5 18.3 28.1 33.3 If the contract has the following evaluation criteria: "employment criterion", "criterion support for local companies" and "criterion of ecological impact of public procurement on the environment", then I will always (or mostly) consider "criterion of ecological impact" as the most important criterion of public procurement Absolutely disagree 0 0 2.2 6.3 6.7 0.3743 Somewhat disagree 20.3 26.3 30.1 34.4 40 Do not know 31.2 36.8 39.8 31.2 20 Somewhat agree 43.8 31.6 24.7 25 33.3 Absolutely agree 4.7 5.3 3.2 3.1 0 If I would like to include in the contract a criterion of ecological impact on the environment, then I would classify it as a general obligation of the supplier under the contract Absolutely disagree 0 0 0 3.1 0 0.1819 Somewhat disagree 1.6 0 7.5 3.1 26.7 Do not know 29.7 31.6 26.9 18.8 20 Somewhat agree 56.2 68.4 55.9 65.6 46.7 Absolutely agree 12.5 0 9.7 9.4 6.7 Page 17 of 19 Plačeketal. Environ Sci Eur (2021) 33:94 Acknowledgements Not applicable. Authors’ contributions All authors contributed equally to this manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript. Funding This research received funding from the Czech Grant Agency [GA19-06020S]. Availability of data and materials The datasets used and/or analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request. Declarations Ethics approval and consent to participate Not applicable. Consent for publication Not applicable. Competing interests The authors declare that they have no competing interests. Table 10 Survey questions response percentages by experience in awarding public contracts with ecological (or environmental) criteria for Politicians Bold values are statistically significant Questions Associations with Experience in awarding public contracts with ecological (or environmental) criteria Tests results Answers Yes No Fisher’s Exact Test p-value It is socially useful to award ’green public contracts’, i.e., contracts which they have in evaluation criteria include an environmental criterion Absolutely disagree 1.9 1.9 < 0.00001 Somewhat disagree 9.9 5.9 Do not know 27.7 47.4 Somewhat agree 48.8 38.5 Absolutely agree 11.7 6.4 I am in favor of awarding public contracts that take into account the environmental criterion Absolutely disagree 1.9 1.3 0.00001 Somewhat disagree 0.9 3.8 Do not know 25.4 39 Somewhat agree 50.2 45 Absolutely agree 21.6 11 Personally, I would prefer to announce a tender for a cheaper contract (without environmental requirements) before awarding a more expensive public contract with environmental characteristics Absolutely disagree 3.3 2.1 0.00045 Somewhat disagree 21.6 18.3 Do not know 16.4 30.5 Somewhat agree 44.1 40.1 Absolutely agree 14.6 9.1 If I have information that a public contract with an environmental criterion increases the risk probability of appealing to the Office for Protection of Competition, then I will clearly prefer the public contract without environmental criterion Absolutely disagree 2.3 2.2 0.00147 Somewhat disagree 10.8 7.2 Do not know 15.5 26.9 Somewhat agree 40.4 42 Absolutely agree 31 21.8 If the contract has the following evaluation criteria: "employment criterion", "criterion support for local companies" and "criterion of ecological impact of public procurement on the environment", then I will always (or mostly) consider "criterion of ecological impact" as the most important criterion of public procurement Absolutely disagree 1.4 3.8 0.3953 Somewhat disagree 27.2 25.8 Do not know 28.6 30.5 Somewhat agree 33.8 32.9 Absolutely agree 8.9 7 If I would like to include in the contract a criterion of ecological impact on the environment, then I would classify it as a general obligation of the supplier under the contract Absolutely disagree 1.4 1.1 0.00021 Somewhat disagree 5.6 5.2 Do not know 13.6 25.3 Somewhat agree 57.7 56.8 Absolutely agree 21.6 11.6 Page 18 of 19 Plačeketal. 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