I have just finished reading Annamaria La Chimia & Peter Trepte (eds), Public Procurement and Aid Effectiveness. A Roadmap under Construction (Oxford, Hart/Bloomsbury, 2019). 416 pages, £86.40, reading time: 20 hours aprox.
Heart in hand, I must admit that I may not have been tempted to pick up the book if it was not edited by two scholars for whom I have great intellectual admiration and with whom I have long-lasting friendships—and if I was not on research leave and thus, having some more reading time than usual... the snazzy book cover certainly also helped. I would have made a big mistake if I had left the book accumulate virtual dust in my (only growing) to read list, though.
So this unofficial book review (remember, I am friends with the editors) seeks to save you from making that mistake yourself. If you are interested in procurement governance, or even on the broader field of international political economy, you should read this book.
I have found the book to be truly excellent and very thought-provoking, not least because it covers much more than procurement as a conduit for the economic effectiveness of foreign/development aid. For sure, this core preoccupation of the aid community (and a fringe of procurement community) is addressed centrally, thoroughly and authoritatively in the book, including interdisciplinary perspectives from political scientists, economists, lawyers and leading practitioners at international institutions. The book is thus a very valuable source of information and analysis for anyone researching the field. However, the book goes well beyond this.
The book is fascinating because it engages with a wicked problem: how to reconcile multiple regulatory layers driven by a multitude of conflicting normative values, how to find a balance between regulatory complexity and effectiveness of practical interventions, and how to do so in a manner that does not perpetuate inequality or result in regulatory imperialism. In other words, the book ultimately engages with the (impossible) challenge of designing a (perfect) procurement system of worldwide application and capable of delivering a multitude of policy goals on top of the ever present value for money.
Not that the book seeks that goal. However, in assessing legal reforms promoted by the international donor community that implicitly sought ways to achieve that nirvana (through harmonisation, alignment and other, sometimes mutually-contradictory, regulatory strategies) or that were understood as prescribing a ‘magic solution’ for such upgrade of country systems (such as the OECD Methodology for Assessing Procurement Systems, MAPS) , the book is a very effective mirror of the ugly side of procurement reform efforts.
As such, and covering such a polyhedric subject-matter, the book can be read at very different levels or from many different angles, and rewards the reader with a large number of insights that are easily transferable to other (ie non-aid) areas of procurement research and, more generally, public governance. The following are my main take aways. When you read it, please feel free to add yours in the comments section.
I found the book tells a fascinating story about hidden drivers for procurement reform and the pernicious effects they can have. Indeed, the book demonstrates how the goal of improving domestic procurement systems (in developing countries) was not set independently or with a strict concern for regulatory quality, but rather as a demand of international institutions seeking to ‘be able to rely’ on domestic systems in order to foster procurement simplification and to achieve goals of country ownership of the relevant projects.
It also demonstrates how the blueprint of what was considered ‘good procurement’ derived either from the own procurement rules of the international institutions (mostly, multilateral development banks, MDBs) or from half-baked (and misunderstood?) attempts at capturing what defines good procurement regulation (notably, the OECD MAPS, now revised). The book shines a light on the failures of such approaches and queries the wisdom of any similar future attempts. This is something that should not go unnoticed (and I am here thinking, in particular, of the World Bank’s renewed Benchmarking Public Procurement, criticised here). The book offers an unequivocal cautionary tale of the negative spillover effects of badly construed and improperly understood and/or applied regulatory benchmarks. To me, this is one of its big contributions.
From a close perspective, the book demonstrates how ‘increasing aid effectiveness’ was used as an excuse or lever to push for much broader regulatory reforms and how, in turn, this affected international discussions beyond the context of aid and of great relevance to ‘ordinary’ procurement. However, it is very difficult to establish or observe a linear influence between ‘general’ and ‘aid-related’ procurement reforms, and both seem to be part of a melting pot that resulted in significant changes of transnational procurement regulation over the first half of this decade (notably, the new WTO GPA, UNCITRAL Model Law, EU Procurement Package and World Bank Procurement Framework). All these changes evidence different speeds of pendular movements, ranging between constraints on discretion and flexibilisation of procurement regulation, as well as between purely economic and broader policy goals.
From a regulatory perspective, finally, the book also shows how an excessive focus (rectius, obsession) with fighting procurement corruption has resulted in both exceedingly rigid approaches and insufficient regulatory responses. The book documents excesses in the way that draconian anti-corruption measures can freeze frontline decision-makers and prevent them from exercising commercial discretion or risk-taking in the public interest, while leaving the real beneficiaries of corruption unaffected. This is framed in terms of an excessive reliance on agency theory for procurement regulation design. Following from that, the book shows how procurement and its tools (eg debarment) cannot be seen as the one and only regulatory tool, but rather need to be coordinated with the broader institutions of a criminal law and public law system. Failures to do so can, in large part, result from the original blueprint adopted for procurement reform (as mentioned above), as eg the MDBs do not have such a broader regulatory context.
Moving to broader themes of global governance, the book also shows the double standards applied to the assessment of country systems, depending on whether a country is a donor or a partner (ie beneficiary of aid). While developed and international organisations’ procurement systems are largely assessed on the basis of their regulation of procurement, the assessment of developing countries’ has focused more clearly on institutional capacity and on issues of professionalisation. Some of the experiences collected in the book, in particular regarding methods for the assessment of procurement systems’ maturity and for the training of a procurement workforce, could be very useful in the context of eg the European Commission’s current procurement strategy and its initiatives on procurement professionalisation. The analysis in the book also stresses the need to focus system evaluation and institutional development on the basis of procurement outcomes (not processes, or inputs), which in my view is a pending task for all procurement systems, not just those of countries receiving development aid.
Talking about double standards, the book also reports on the resurgence of tied aid and aid conditionality as one more incarnation of the surge in procurement protectionism. The discussion offers some interesting parallels with the analysis of offsets in defence procurement markets and, more generally, with the use of procurement as an industrial policy tool. These are not issues left behind, but rather a constant fight for those advocating free trade, including through procurement, to be consistent when they engage in foreign/development aid or in defence-related procurement, as well as more generally. Given the emerging use of procurement as an ‘Industry 4.0 policy tool’, these issues can only gain even further prominence in years to come.
A final thought the book spurred in me is that perhaps we should, within reason, start making ourselves comfortable with a relatively high level of regulatory complexity, in particular because outcomes-oriented procurement that seeks to achieve the sustainable development goals is a difficult endeavour. What international institutions and countries may need to do is stop trying to find easy fixes through nirvana-like regulatory simplification approaches and rather invest (heavily) in the creation of the required level of competence and capacity in their procurement workforce. This may not seem like a very likely prospect, but perhaps its chances increase if policy-makers and practitioners read this book, and if academics continue to push for practically-implementable procurement reform. So get your copy and enjoy the read.
