It is not easy being green: increasing sustainable public procurement behaviour

To achieve greater sustainability, governments need to continuously adapt their purchasing activities to innovations in the market. Sustainable procurement is a decision-making process in which the decisions of procurers determine if the full potential of sustainable procurement is used. The decisions and thus behaviour of procurers are therefore crucial for the successfulness of sustainable procurement. According to organizational theory, commitment to change could influence this behaviour. Hence, in the study, we examined if commitment to implement sustainable procurement increases sustainable procurement behaviour by Dutch public procurers and what determines this commitment to implement sustainable procurement are. Our study shows first that both affective commitment to implement sustainable procurement and procedural justice increase sustainable procurement behaviour. In addition, the results show that commitment to change acts as a mechanismbetween fitwith vision, ecological sustainability attitude, procedural justice and sustainable procurement behaviour

Implementing Sustainable Public Procurement

For the execution of policies, as well as for its own operations, governments procure goods and services, ranging from paper and pencils to fighter planes, cleaning services and public road works. In the European Union public procurement represents 16% of the gross domestic product. The Dutch national government alone annually spends 10 billion euro on procurement. Governments are increasingly using their authority as a large buyer in the market to compel private organisations to contribute to the achievement of their public objectives (Rolfstam, 2009). Public procurement has thus become a policy instrument to reach societal outcomes. In this research a specific example of how the Dutch national government is trying to achieve an o

Nondestructive Testing of “Thick” Aerospace Honeycomb Structures Using Through-Transmitted Ultrasonic Guided Waves

The idea of using guided elastic waves for the purpose of assessing the fitness for service of aerospace composite structural materials is not new. “Pure” longitudinal or shear waves cannot exist in layers whose thickness dimension is of the order of an ultrasonic wavelength

Sustainable Public Procurement: The Impact of Ability, Motivation, and Opportunity on the Implementation of Different Types of Sustainable Public Procurement

Public organisations develop sustainable public procurement (SPP) policies to compel suppliers to contribute to societal goals. Studies show that the ability, motivation, and opportunity that procurers have to procure in a sustainable manner affect the uptake of SPP. Most studies into SPP examine these factors only in the context of one type of SPP (e.g., green procurement). The goal of this paper is therefore to examine the relationship between ability, motivation, and opportunity and six types of SPP: (1) green public procurement, (2) social return on investment, (3) circular economy, (4) bio-based public procurement, (5) innovation-oriented public procurement and (6) international social criteria. An online survey was administered amongst procurers working in Dutch public organisations. The research shows that ability, motivation, and opportunity affect Green Public Procurement (GPP). Opportunity did affect green public procurement, innovation-oriented public procurement a

Sustainable Procurement in Practice: Explaining the Degree of Sustainable Procurement from an Organisational Perspective

Sustainable procurement is often used to reduce negative environmental impacts related to production and consumption. Several studies in the sustainable procurement literature have identified potential drivers of and barriers to sustainable procurement, which are often organisational in nature. Using an organisational perspective, this paper examines if and how three organisational factors – top management support, expertise and commitment – influence the degree of sustainable procurement in procurement projects in the Dutch national government. The article concludes that both organizational factors (especially commitment) and the actions of individual actors are important

Sustainable procurement : A big-data study into the level of sustainability of more than 140,000 published procurement contract notices by Belgian contracting authorities

The __objective__ of this study is: to systematically analyse all public procurement notices and specifications from the E-notification database and determine to what extent and how Belgian public purchasers respond to sustainable procurement policy in the public procurement notices and contract specifications and then to what extent patterns and best practice can be identified. In addition, the following __research questions__ are fundamental: 1. What is sustainable procurement, in the opinion of the Belgian government? 2. To what extent and how do purchasers respond to the sustainable procurement policy in the public procurement notices and specifica

Nonlinear Model Predictive Control of Robotic Systems with Control Lyapunov Functions

The theoretical unification of Nonlinear Model Predictive Control (NMPC) with Control Lyapunov Functions (CLFs) provides a framework for achieving optimal control performance while ensuring stability guarantees. In this paper we present the first real-time realization of a unified NMPC and CLF controller on a robotic system with limited computational resources. These limitations motivate a set of approaches for efficiently incorporating CLF stability constraints into a general NMPC formulation. We evaluate the performance of the proposed methods compared to baseline CLF and NMPC controllers with a robotic Segway platform both in simulation and on hardware. The addition of a prediction horizon provides a performance advantage over CLF based controllers, which operate optimally point-wise in time. Moreover, the explicitly imposed stability constraints remove the need for difficult cost function and parameter tuning required by NMPC. Therefore the unified controller improves the performance of each isolated controller and simplifies the overall design process

Nonlinear Model Predictive Control of Robotic Systems with Control Lyapunov Functions

The theoretical unification of Nonlinear Model Predictive Control (NMPC) with Control Lyapunov Functions (CLFs) provides a framework for achieving optimal control performance while ensuring stability guarantees. In this paper we present the first real-time realization of a unified NMPC and CLF controller on a robotic system with limited computational resources. These limitations motivate a set of approaches for efficiently incorporating CLF stability constraints into a general NMPC formulation. We evaluate the performance of the proposed methods compared to baseline CLF and NMPC controllers with a robotic Segway platform both in simulation and on hardware. The addition of a prediction horizon provides a performance advantage over CLF based controllers, which operate optimally point-wise in time. Moreover, the explicitly imposed stability constraints remove the need for difficult cost function and parameter tuning required by NMPC. Therefore the unified controller improves the performance of each isolated controller and simplifies the overall design process

The management of change in public organisations: A literature review

This article presents a review of the recent literature on change management in public organisations and sets out to explore the extent to which this literature has responded to earlier critiques regarding the lack of (public) contextual factors. The review includes 133 articles published on this topic in the period from 2000 to 2010. The articles are analyzed based on the themes of the context, content, process, outcome and leadership of change. We identified whether the articles referred to different orders of change, as well as their employed methods and theory. Our findings concentrate on the lack of detail on change processes and outcomes and the gap between the common theories used to study change. We propose an agenda for the study of change management in public organisations that focuses on its complex nature by building theoretical bridges and performing more in-depth empirical and comparative studies on c