Rethinking resilience: the impact of Public Procurement
Esmee Peters (ETM), Louise Knight (ETM)
Abstract
Recent crises such as the Russian invasion (food and gas scarcity), the US-China trade war (semiconductor chips crisis), COVID (medical products and medicine shortages) all led to imminent product shortages. Yet, the impact of the biggest environmental crisis, the climate crisis, on resource scarcity is not even comprehendible. All these events happening in rapid succession of another, or possibly at the same time, shows the infeasibility of trying to combat disturbances and return to a stable state of companies and their supply chains. Instead, the world is in a perma-crisis, going from one unpredictable event to another, where disturbances cannot be treated as outliers. Underlying the importance of having a resilient product supply (chain) in today’s world.
In these crises, public procurement (government buying) played or could have played, a vital role in ensuring product availability. For example, during the COVID-19 pandemic, public procurement (PP) was involved in procuring personal protective equipment. But PP’s role was also vital in past disasters such as hurricane Katrina. Similarly, PP plays a vital role in the economic recovery after a disaster and in mitigating future crises, such as the climate crisis, through sustainable purchasing. Hence, governments often use public spending (through procurement) as a lever for fighting disasters, pandemics, and future crises. Yet, public procurement is missing on most resilience research agendas. This paper (and PhD) discusses the impact of public procurement on supply chain resilience, using the COVID crisis as a case study.