Unmasking Public Procurement Resilience: Systemic Challenges Revealed and Lessons Learned by COVID-19

Unmasking Public Procurement Resilience
Systemic Challenges Revealed and Lessons Learned by COVID-19

This PhD dissertation examines the often-overlooked role of public procurement in supply chain resilience (SCRES), particularly focusing on the socio-technical challenges within public procurement systems.

The COVID-19 pandemic exposed systemic vulnerabilities within global supply chains, where difficulties in purchasing medical equipment had widespread consequences. Similar issues arose from recent geopolitical crises such as the Russian invasion in Ukraine and the US-China trade war, which led to critical scarcities in food, gas, and semiconductor chips. Public procurement also plays a vital role in natural disaster response (e.g., hurricane relief efforts) and in addressing future crises, such as climate change. This highlights public procurement’s potential for addressing supply scarcities in current and future crises, yet, surprisingly, public procurement remains largely absent from SCRES literature.

The dissertation situates public procurement resilience at the interdisciplinary nexus of supply chain management, public administration, and disaster management. Each chapter employs different theoretical perspectives, bridging these fields. Examples include the Factor Market Rivalry framework to understand the rivalry perspective, or High Reliability Theory to comprehend how networks can organize for resilience.

Grounded in practice and interpretive sensemaking, the PhD dissertation draws on over 190 interviews from 33 countries. Through this interdisciplinary approach, the dissertation challenges both our understanding of SCRES and public procurement. For SCRES, it questions the traditional firm-centered perspective of resilience and the notion of crises as “black swans”. Instead, a network perspective, viewed through a perma-crisis lens, underscores the need for familiarity, adaptability, and continuous learning across actors.

Similarly, this dissertation argues for a broader and deeper perspective on public procurement. This includes recognizing public procurement’s strategic importance and understanding that COVID-19, above all, exposed existing structural issues. At a deeper level, public procurement organizations need to rethink their priorities, norms, and standards. More broadly, public procurement is still not fully recognized as a central part of public administration governance, yet it should be embedded within the highest levels of policy and understood in a much wider context.