#47: You Write Sustainability Into the Contract. Does Anyone Actually Check?

So let's step back from the individual stories for a second.

to the real numbers, how much any of this is happening at scale.

Back to Desiree with data from her own research in Switzerland.

That's a little deflating.

I think

it's a matter of implementation more than regulation.

We had actually a similar reform like the UK just a few years earlier in 2019. where we moved from the most economically advantageous tender to the most advantageous tender.

Change is literally zero or only close to zero if you look at the data that we have so far.

So not a whole lot has changed, even though the law has changed.

So I do believe it's a matter of implementation.

And what we saw is that, for example, and that is another, I think, very important part.

We talked a lot in this panel about sustainability, but like what kind of sustainability, right? We have environmental, we have social, and we have also an economic component of sustainability.

And I think that is very important that we distinguish what we are talking about, because at least the data that I looked into public contracts in Switzerland, they showed that Authorities after the reform were using only 4% of environmental sustainability criteria in tenders of all construction contracts that I looked into.

That's pretty low.

Social sustainability was even lower.

It was close to 0%.

So the question is a little bit, what sustainability are we talking about? 4%.

That's

how many Swiss construction tenders use environmental criteria after the law changed to make room for them.

and social criteria came in at close to zero.

Desiré's point isn't that the reform itself was a bad idea, it's that changing the law and changing behavior turned out to be two entirely separate projects, which I think is a distinction a lot of legislators still don't fully reckon with.