Advantages and pitfalls of green public procurement as a European strategic tool

Green public procurement supports EU climate goals but may conflict with other objectives, creating trade-offs that challenge its effectiveness

Publishing date: 24 September 2025
Authors: Marie-Sophie Lappe Francesco Nicoli

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The findings of this paper will be presented live at Bruegel on 24 September 2025, at the event 'Towards a Green Procurement Union: trade-offs and strategic choices'. Watch the livestream here.

Public procurement, or the purchasing of goods and services by governments, is among the most powerful policy tools available to the public sector. Accounting for nearly 14 percent of European Union GDP, it shapes markets, signals priorities and can in principle create demand for transformative innovation. Green public procurement (GPP), which aims to include environmental considerations in the procurement process, has been identified as an important lever to deploy public spending in line with the EU’s climate goals. In this paper, we examine GPP as a strategic tool to support the EU’s decarbonisation, industrial and geopolitical objectives, and assess it in context of the EU’s broader policy agenda.

While we acknowledge the importance of GPP in the European decarbonisation process, we argue that its widespread use might also lead to policy tensions with the EU’s other strategic objectives, such as fiscal stability and strategic autonomy. Throughout the paper, we illustrate how the interplay of these goals leads to trade-offs that are very complex to accommodate.

While procurement can empower and add financial weight to European actions aimed at achieving strategic goals, including decarbonisation, it can only be effective if the EU’s underlying strategic policy goals remain consistent with each other. Trying to fit procurement practices to multiple contrasting objectives might result in longer procurement timelines, less competition, more administrative burden and higher costs for governments. These risk hindering the effectiveness of European public administrations in delivering on the objectives, and also in their daily operations, disrupting the public administration’s purchasing practices. Finally, after having illustrated the potential benefits and pitfalls of green procurement, we discuss and evaluate several policy tools that could help the EU resolve the tensions that a widespread introduction of GPP might produce.

This Working Paper has been produced with financial support from the European Climate Foundation.

About the authors

Marie-Sophie Lappe

Marie-Sophie is a Research Analyst at Bruegel. She specialises in macroeconomic and capital market policy.

Her research examines the role of pension funds in the economy, focusing on their role in unlocking household savings. She has also contributed to research on the European Union budget. More generally, she is interested in the interplay between financial markets and the macroeconomy.

She speaks German and English.

She holds a master’s degree in Economics and Finance from the University of Tübingen. In her master thesis, she explored the modelling and estimation of rare disaster risk in Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium (DSGE) models. Before joining Bruegel, she worked at the European Central Bank in the International Policy analysis division. She worked on commodity markets, ranging from analysis on geopolitical risk in oil markets to the effects of El Niño on food commodity prices. She also has experience analysing international financial markets, where she was involved on monitoring developments in bond and equity markets.
Francesco Nicoli

Francesco Nicoli is assistant professor of political science at the Politecnico Institute of Turin. He also serves as professor of political economy at Gent University and he is Affiliate Fellow at the department of economics of the University of Amsterdam. He was a Non-resident Fellow at Bruegel until September 2025.

He holds a PhD in political economy, and his research focuses on the role of long-term, fundamental socioeconomic challenges (such as technological change and globalization) in shaping processes of integration at European and international level. His work has appeared in leading scientific outlets such as the Journal of European Public Policy (JEPP), the Journal of Common Market Studies (JCMS), Economic Policy, European Union Politics, the European Journal of Political Economy, Policy and Society, the European Journal of Public Health, Comparative European Politics and others. He specialises in experimental survey research, econometric analysis, counter-factual methods, as well as a range of theory-based approaches.