This book examines the regulatory rules on public procurement in selected African countries and provides a comparative analysis of key regulatory issues.

"Public procurement law governs the acquisition of the goods and services that a state needs to fulfil its public functions. This area of law has seen tremendous development globally in recent years, and Africa is no exception.In many African countries there have been sweeping reforms in the regulatory regimes that govern public procurement. This trend shows no signs of slowing down.On the African continent, public procurement law is closely tied to pressing policy issues: from development plans to donor aid and international lending, to anti-corruption agendas and capacity challenges, to public finance management, enforceable remedies under the rule of law, and human rights. This book investigates a number of these themes to foster an understanding of public procurement law in the context of contemporary Africa."--Back cover.

This timely work reflects on the role and obligations of the state as a buyer of goods and services, from the dual disciplinary perspectives of public procurement and human rights. Through theoretical and doctrinal analyses, and practice-focused case studies, it interrogates the evolving character of public procurement as an interface for multiple normative regimes and competing policies. Challenging the prevailing paradigm which subordinates human rights to narrowly-defined economic goals, insightful contributions advance a compelling case for greater inter-disciplinarity and policy coherence as crucial to realising international policies such as those embodied in the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights and 2030 Sustainable Development Goals.

Anti-corruption measures have firmly taken centre stage in the development agenda of international organisations as well as in developed and developing countries. One area in which corruption manifests itself is in public procurement and, as a result, States have adopted various measures to prevent and curb corruption in public procurement. One such mechanism for dealing with procurement corruption is to debar or disqualify corrupt suppliers from bidding for or otherwise obtaining government contracts. This book examines the issues and challenges raised by the debarment or disqualification of corrupt suppliers from public contracts. Implementing a disqualification mechanism in public procurement raises serious practical and conceptual difficulties, which are not always considered by legislative provisions on disqualification. Some of the problems that may arise from the use of disqualifications include determining whether a conviction for corruption ought to be a pre-requisite to disqualification, bearing in mind that corruption thrives in secret, resulting in a dearth of convictions. Another issue is determining how to balance the tension between granting adequate procedural safeguards to a supplier in disqualification proceedings and not delaying the procurement process. A further issue is determining the scope of the disqualification in the sense of determining whether it applies to firms, natural persons, subcontractors, subsidiaries or other persons related to the corrupt firm and whether disqualification will lead to the termination of existing contracts. The book compares and contrasts the legal, practical and institutional approaches to the implementation of the disqualification mechanism in the European Union, the United Kingdom, the United States, the Republic of South Africa and the World Bank.

Innovation in public procurement is essential for sustainable and inclusive growth in an increasingly globalized economy. To achieve that potential, both the promises and the perils of innovation must be investigated, including the risks and opportunities of joint procurement across borders in the European Union and the United States. This in-depth research investigates innovation in public procurement from three different perspectives. First, leading academics and practitioners assess the purchase of innovation, with a particular focus on urban public contracting in smart cities involving meta-infrastructures, public-private partnership arrangements and smart contracts. A second line of inquiry looks for ways to encourage innovative suppliers. Here, the collected authors draw on emerging lessons from the US and Europe, to explore both the costs and the benefits of spurring innovation through procurement. A third perspective looks to various innovations in the procurement process itself, with a focus on the effects of joint and cross-border procurement in the EU and US landscapes. The chapters review new technologies and platforms, the increasingly automated means of selecting suppliers, and the related efficiencies that “big data” can bring to public procurement. Expanding on research in the editors’ prior volume, Integrity and Efficiency in Sustainable Public Contracts: Balancing Corruption Concerns in Public Procurement Internationally (Bruylant 2014), this volume builds on a series of academic conferences and exchanges to address these issues from sophisticated academic, institutional and practical perspectives, and to point the way to future research on the contractual models that are emerging from new procurement technologies.

The first part of the book offers a unique reflection on enduring themes in public procurement law such as the shaping of the scope of this regulatory regime, the development of tighter criteria for the exclusion of candidates and tenderers, the conduct of qualitative selection, the consolidation of the court’s previous approach to technical specifications, new developments in tender evaluation, the inclusion of contract performance clauses with a social orientation, and, last but not least, the development of interpretive guidance concerning several aspects of the procurement remedies regime. The book shows that the period 2015–2017 has been an interesting and rather intense period for the development of EU public procurement law, where the CJEU has not only consolidated some parts of its long-standing procurement case law but also introduced significant innovations that can create future challenges for the consistency of this regulatory regime. The first part of the book concludes with some thoughts on some of the salient aspects of this recent episode of silent reform of EU public procurement law through CJEU case law. The second part of the book contains the essential excerpts of forty-one chronologically ordered judgments issued by the CJEU in the period 2015–2017, which have been selected because they either raise new issues or important matters of public procurement law. Each of the selected judgments is followed by an exhaustive and critical in-depth analysis, highlighting and providing insight into its legal and practical issues and consequences. An exhaustive subject-index offers the reader quick and easy access to the case law treated in this book. This unique book, a ‘must-have’ reference work for judges and courts of all EU Member States and candidate countries and academics and legal professionals who are active in the field of procurement law, will also be valuable for law libraries and law schools across the world and for law students who focus their research and studies on EU law.