Final Event in Schaerbeek of the Making Spend Matter Network- Changing Procurement, Changing Cities

On the 24th march 2021, Schaerbeek welcomed the final transfer network event of the URBACT project Making Spend Matter. In 2018, at the beginning of our journey through public procurement, we couldn’t imagine that we would be forced to organise this event in an online format. The challenge became then clear: organising an online virtual final conference for two hundred people. And making sure that it will be not boring.

The preparation of an online event is different from a physical one. Firstly, we planned few rehearsals to check the proper functioning of the online platform. In the second place, we had to pay attention to the rhythm of speakers’ interventions to ensure dynamic and interactive atmosphere. We also considered the technical challenges: what should we do if a speaker lose the connection? How to ensure access to interpretation in different languages simultaneously? Finally, it was difficult to accept we could not celebrate the end of such an engaging project with all the partners in the same room. Indeed, within the network, friendships could develop thanks to informal moments among consortium members. Eventually, we can be satisfied with the result: with around 200 participants from 7 countries, the final event of Making Spend Matter is a success in such a trouble period.

The main objective of the final event for an European project is the knowledge transfer to stakeholders involved in public procurement. The Making Spend Matter Network has created a lot of good practices and tools to improve the practice of public procurement, you can find these in the Making Spend Matter Toolkit. These results are shared within the public administrations of the partners’ cities, as well as with other cities that would be interested to initiate a similar journey in assessing their public procurement spend.

By exchanging on what we have learned with other cities, we help to improve the impact of public procurement. With tools and good practices, we think that cities in Europe can use public procurement to evolve towards a more sustainable horizon on the social, economic and environmental aspect.

Among the public services in Schaerbeek, we aim to implement what we learnt on different aspects thanks to this project. Firstly, there is an opportunity of gathering, using and sharing the data about public spend between all services of public administration. To do that, the spend analysis and the gap analysis are central tools. Secondly, training for civil servants on the local legislation over public procurement and its cycle would increase awareness on available options for environmental and social criteria in public bids. As a major result, Schaerbeek has adopted its Strategic plan to show direction in short and long term to progress towards sustainable public procurement. Finally, the public services should establish a continuous dialogue with enterprises to make public procurement easier to access for the private sector.

At the end of the journey of Making Spend Matter, the final conference provided a place to exchange, showing the power of public procurement of being a lever for change. Following the approach of “baby steps” to bring changes in current practices, we hope that our experience will be useful for other cities, enterprises and actors involved in public procurement.

Article written by: Stanislas Deville, Schaerbeek