Pamplona

Pamplona is a midsized city of 200,000 inhabitants and a large floating population of students (it has two universities), in a metropolitan area of more than 380,000 inhabitants, covering 25 km2. Pamplona is the capital of Navarra region (640.000 inhabitants and a GDP of 19.827 million euro in 2017), located in the north of Spain, bordering France through the Pyrenees, and occupies a strategic situation as a connection node between Spain and Europe

Pamplona City Council has included sustainable public procurement clauses in purchasing specifications before and is a pioneer in Spain in this field. The City Council has recently launched the 'Trebatu' project, an initiative that aims to promote access to public procurement in the local administration to small businesses and social economy companies.

A team of municipal lawyers and economy experts are designing a Work Plan on public procurement with the aim of making it more sustainable and equitable, in line with the new regional law on public procurement (Ley Foral 2/2018, de 13 de abril, de Contratos Públicos) and the Directive 2014/24/EU that intend to facilitate, specifically, the participation of SMEs in public procurement. Thus, in terms of hiring, specifications are being unified to simplify them and make them more accessible and at the same time introduce social and environmental clauses and analyse the opportunities that the new European regulatory framework provides to encourage the participation of smaller companies in different areas and services of local public procurement. This plan includes training smaller companies through practical workshops.

The transfer of the Good Practice will improve the local economy, increase social cohesion and reduce environmental impacts through procurement, as it is a useful methodology to start evaluating the impact of the public expenditure by spend analysis of their procurements, making a diagnosis, defining indicators etc.

The knowledge / Good Practice transfer will help the city of Pamplona to further foster change and innovation in its procurement practice.

Pamplona wishes to explore how the Good Practice and methodology can take into account issues such as gender equality in employment or climate change considerations (as a way to enhance the competitiveness of locally produced goods and services).

A main challenge will be to design municipal budgets taking into account their impact on the local economy, the labour market, social welfare and the environment.