Video: Workshop on Public Procurement

Speakers: Svetlana Suslova (HSE), Anastasiya Bozhya-Volya (HSE), Elena Shadrina (HSE).

Public Procurement of Social Services in Russia Following New Procurement Legislation

Svetlana Suslova, Higher School of Economics

This paper explores the competitive procurement of social services in the regions of Russia before and after introducing a new law on procurement on January 1, 2014. The law obliges authorities procuring goods and services to give some kinds of preferences to so-called ‘socially oriented nonprofit organizations’ as their contractors.  This measure is aimed at encouraging nonprofit sector development. The main goal of the current study is to determine whether this change in the legislation creates the new possibilities for nonprofit organizations to participate in social service procurement. This study relies on quantitative data on social services tendering and qualitative data from interviews with the leaders of nonprofit organizations. The main source of the quantitative data is the files of the official website of the Russian Federation on Procurement Information. I explore data on social services tendering in Russian regions of Volga Federal District in 2012 and 2014. The tender bid evaluation records have been analyzed in terms of information about the service itself, the number of participating bidders, the types of these entities, the score they were given, and who was chosen to be the authority’s contractor. The state of affairs is compared with one existed before the new law was enacted. On the one hand, the findings indicate that the changes in the procurement legislation have improved Russian nonprofits’ capacity to participate in the competitive bidding process. On the other hand, negative attitude of NPOs to social service procurement conditions and the composition of nonprofit bidders show that the situation has not improved for all nonprofit social service providers who can become government contractors.

Coproduction of Local Public Goods with Involvement of Neighborhood Associations in Russia

Anastasiya Bozhya-Volya, Higher School of Economics

Neighborhood associations (NAs) in Russia are the groups of initiative citizens that attempt to improve living conditions on a certain area (the yard, block of buildings, micro-district, other communities). Local authorities are interested in such self-organization of citizens, as it allows solving local issues more effectively. NAs are a non-profit organization, their activities are largely concerned with external financial support. In many cases regional and local authorities of large cities provide such support. In other cities NAs actively organize joint projects with business on an appropriate territory. Accordingly, the research issue is how to organize an interaction between local authorities and NAs so that the latter form the incentives to attract external sources of funding (business, self-taxation) in addition to the budget. Moreover, for civic engagement developing (on the basis of NAs), it is necessary to shift the directions in strategic planning of NAs from public entertainment events to more socially important projects for respective territory. In this study, was conducted content analysis of the activities of NAs in 50 large Russian cities. In addition, was analyzed the forms of financial support of NAs from regional and local budgets in 70 regional centers of Russia. Also were identified the benefits and limitations of these forms of support for local administration and for the NAs. Subsequently we are going to investigate the characteristics of contracting for collective goods (Roels, 2010). It is also assumed that for the solution of research question more appropriate to move from the universal characteristics of NAs to the selection of several typical cases and develop a system of incentives for each case separately.

Drivers and Barriers to Environmental Public Procurement Practice in Russia

Elena Shadrina, Higher School of Economics, Perm; Dmitry Vinogradov , Essex University

This study explores factors that help or hinder Russian organizations to implement green public procurement initiatives. In Russia, this type of public procurement is novel for the authorities. What drives public and private sector organizations to integrate environmentally friendly practices in their procurement and supply? What are the barriers to environmentally friendly practices in the procurement and supply? The research is based on the main categories of internal and external drivers and barriers of green supply chain management practices which already have been identified by other researchers. Drivers include organizational factors, regulation, customers, competitors and suppliers as drivers for green supply chain management. Internal barriers include cost and lack of legitimacy, whereas external barriers include regulation, poor supplier commitment and industry specific barriers.