Stewardship and administrative capacity in green public procurement in the Czech Republic: evidence from a large-N survey


 Background

The uptake of green public procurement in the Czech Republic is known to lag behind the European standards. We trace this condition back to the adverse effects of a specific type of decision-making tradeoff faced by the Czech public procurement officials, namely the tradeoff between stewardship and administrative compliance. The tradeoff means that public procurers are aware of, and seek to forestall, administrative risks and complications attendant on the conscientious non-perfunctory implementation of green public procurement.
Results

The overall result is that public procurers ultimately come to prioritize the contract criterion of the lowest price over ecological criteria. The existence of the tradeoff has been generally confirmed by the results of a unique large-N survey of more than 1,100 respondents from a group of local public officials and mayors in the Czech Republic.
Conclusion

We have found that the decision-making of Czech public procurers is affected by the tradeoff between stewardship and administrative compliance, which turn out to be mutually conflicting goals. On the one hand, many public procurers do possess stewardship motivation that shapes their positive attitude to GPP. On the other, they are painfully aware of, and seek to forestall, administrative risks and complications attendant on the conscientious, i.e., non-perfunctory, implementation of GPP.


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Abstract Background The uptake of green public procurement in the Czech Republic is known to lag behind the European standards. We trace this condition back to the adverse effects of a speci c type of decision-making tradeoff faced by the Czech public procurement o cials, namely the tradeoff between stewardship and administrative compliance. The tradeoff means that public procurers are aware of, and seek to forestall, administrative risks and complications attendant on the conscientious non-perfunctory implementation of green public procurement.

Results
The overall result is that public procurers ultimately come to prioritize the contract criterion of the lowest price over ecological criteria. The existence of the tradeoff has been generally con rmed by the results of a unique large-N survey of more than 1,100 respondents from a group of local public o cials and mayors in the Czech Republic.

Conclusion
We have found that the decision-making of Czech public procurers is affected by the tradeoff between stewardship and administrative compliance, which turn out to be mutually con icting goals. On the one hand, many public procurers do possess stewardship motivation that shapes their positive attitude to GPP. On the other, they are painfully aware of, and seek to forestall, administrative risks and complications attendant on the conscientious, i.e., non-perfunctory, implementation of GPP.

Background
The public procurement expenditure of the EU states exceeds 19% of their GDP, which amounts to about 2.3 trillion Euro annually (Poukli, 2021). In view of its tremendous economic proportions, public procurement is widely recognized as a potentially important tool for implementing the EU Circular Economy Action Plan. However, the effectiveness of this tool depends on the extent to which the classic public procurement model is converted into the green public procurement (GPP) model, which may be understood as "a process whereby public authorities seek to procure goods, services and works with a reduced environmental impact throughout their life cycle when compared to goods, services and works with the same primary function that would otherwise be procured" (Alhola et al., 2019;Pacheco -Blanco & Bastante Checa, 2016). Drawing on the analysis of the EU's Europe 2020 Strategy and Renewed Sustainable Development Strategy, Yu et al. (2020, p. 1) note that GPP presents "an essential marketbased instrument for attaining the EU's economic and environmental objectives." Loading [MathJax]/jax/output/CommonHTML/fonts/TeX/fontdata.js Page 3/23 Yet, the signi cance of GPP within public procurement varies widely across Europe. According to Yu et al. (2020), GPP accounts for 21.81% of the total procurement value; and green contracts accounts for 9.49% of all contracts´volume. The highest uptake of GPP is characteristic of countries with a long history of EU membership, such as Denmark, Belgium, France, and Ireland. In contrast, the role of GPP remains relatively insigni cant in the Czech Republic. This country's GPP is currently limited to about 2% of GDP, with the share of green contracts being less than 5% of the total public procurement value (Yu et al., 2020). In an EU-wide comparison of the uptake of GPP, the Czech Republic lags far behind. The present paper inquires into the possible causes of this situation.
Much of the current GPP scholarship foregrounds a variety of decision-making tradeoffs that in uence the uptake of GPP across institutional settings. The most fundamental trade-off faced by procurers and policy makers is probably the one between economic and sustainability goals (Preuss et al., 2011). Gelderman et al. (2015) discuss further trade-offs occurring between complexity, procurers' risk aversion, political relationships and green public procurement goals. The signi cance of these tradeoffs seems largely con rmed by Yu et al.'s (2020) recent empirical study of the public procurement of 33 EU states in 2018. The authors found that green contracts tended to be associated with large contract value and less open procedures, implying negotiations with competitors. Thus, green procurement projects turned out to be more complex than conventional ones. Following Sönnichsen and Clement (2020), a key part of this complexity can be taken to arise from the decision makers' need for the awareness and knowledge of circular public procurement attributes, as speci ed in the circular policy and strategy documents.
The key contention of the present paper is that the relatively poor track record of GPP in the Czech Republic can be traced back to yet another variety of the decision-making tradeoffs faced by public procurement o cials. This is the tradeoff between individual stewardship and compliance with the administrative setting. This tradeoff posits that, in the Czech Republic, administrative compliance tends to be achieved at the cost of stewardship, thus resulting in the low overall rates of GPP uptake. A key conceptual source for identifying this tradeoff is stewardship theory (Lambright, 2009) which argues that public procurers are honest rather than sel sh and are genuinely interested in achieving societal goals. If they act as stewards, public procurers seek intrinsic intangible rewards such as "opportunities for growth, a liation and self-actualization" (Kauppi & van Raaj, 2014, p. 960), but are hindered by undesirable properties of administrative systems. These properties may pertain e.g. to information asymmetries, lack of administrative capacities, and problematic aspects of decentralization. These administrative hindrances may turn public procurers into "honest incompetent actors" (Kauppi & van Raaj, 2014). Over time, however, stewardship turns out to be irreconcilable with the lack of competence and gives way to the formalistic and bureaucratic attitude well-described by the expression "check-the-box-mentality" (Painter-Morland, 2008).
In the public procurement literature, the problems of stewardship have been widely acknowledged in areas as diverse as the Covid recovery (Harland, 2021), social investment (Vluggen et al., 2020), and military procurement (Fourie, 2017). However, we suggest that in the Czech context, these problems are particularly exacerbated by the fact that the Czech public procurement system has traditionally been Loading [MathJax]/jax/output/CommonHTML/fonts/TeX/fontdata.js Page 4/23 more formalistic compared to the older EU members (Plaček et al., 2020). This suggestion is buttressed by the extant evidence of relatively high institutional distrust, underdeveloped audit procedures and lack of expertise in the Czech Republic (Datlab, 2020). As Plaček et al. (2020a) argue, the Czech system of public procurement seems to be aimed at legal compliance and formal accountability rather than the genuine achievement of social goals. Moreover, in many cases, individual procurers are not provided with appropriate education and professional growth opportunities (Plaček, 2020a). Thus, it comes as no surprise that they lose their stewardship motivation and enthusiastic attitudes toward the ideals of ecological sustainability (Roth, 2019).
Empirically, we examine the implications of the proposed tradeoff between stewardship and administrative compliance by drawing on a unique large-N survey of more than 1,100 respondents from a group of local government o cials and mayors in the Czech Republic. The statistical analysis of the data con rms the existence of the tradeoff. The results obtained are important not only for theory but also for public policy making. The results suggest the administrative barriers to GPP arise from the formalistic attitudes toward GPP and are particularly acute in decentralized governance settings. Thus, policy makers must be made responsible for overcoming these barriers to GPP, as well as for stimulating a deeper systemic change aimed at restoring the potential of stewardship.
Decentralization, stewardship, and administrative capacity in the Czech context: framing the research questions The point of departure for deriving our research questions is the study by Plaček et al. (2020b), who found signi cant differences in the e ciency of public service provision among Czech municipalities. The key nding of the authors is that the smaller municipalities perform worse than bigger ones, for reasons related to economies of scale, limited municipal scal capacity, and the effects of grant funding (ibid).
Crucially for the present paper, Plaček et al. (2020b) show that the role of stewardship is systematically weakened by scal illusion, low public involvement and rational inattention of voters. These results are broadly in line with the current scholarship exploring the relationship between decentralization and the performance of local governments. This relationship can be generally taken to depend on information asymmetry, rational ignorance and rational abstention (Boetti et al., 2012, Grossman et al., 1999, bureaucratic behavior (Agasisti et al., 2015), competition among municipalities (Šťastná & Gregor, 2015), scal illusion (Boetti et al., 2012), intergovernmental grants and transfers (Bönisch et al., 2011), and municipality size (Drew et al, 2015).
A similarly precarious relationship between stewardship and administrative capacity is likewise suggested by recent investigations into the capacity of local governments in the Czech Republic to implement new managerial tools or policies. Several studies have found the e ciency of local governments to remain unaffected by the adoption of management tools supported by funds from the EU such as benchmarking, CAF, ISO, and national excellence policy (Plaček et al., 2020c;Plaček et al., 2020d). The authors take these ndings to be indicative of a number of administrative problems, including a predominantly ceremonial and formalistic approach to the implementation of public policies, and purely Loading [MathJax]/jax/output/CommonHTML/fonts/TeX/fontdata.js Page 5/23 verbal commitment to reforms on the part of local policy makers (ibid). In view of the lack of support from and control by the central government, local governments focus on the formal, perfunctory ful llment of EU funding requirements (ibid).
The signi cance of these problems is further con rmed by a recent comparative study of the EU states exhibiting low GDP performance (Plaček et al., 2020g). Drawing on a uniquely large sample of public procurement in 11 Central and Eastern European countries, the study employed hierarchical regression to analyze factors in uencing the types of public contracts (ibid). The authors found that institutional factors such as the level of administrative decentralization, quality of governance and corruption climate have a greater impact on overpricing than individual decisions by the contracting authority. Again, the emerging pattern is that stewardship considerations, which could potentially inform these decisions, turn out to be trumped by administrative bottlenecks.
In the light of these studies, we can formulate several more speci c conjectures about how the tradeoff between stewardship and administrative compliance plays out in the decentralized governance context of the Czech Republic. Drawing on the insight that education, information, and awareness are the most important factors of individual acceptance of GPP (Liu et al., 2019;Nikolaou & Loizou, 2015;Grandia & Voncken, 2019), we consider stewardship behaviors to be more likely forthcoming from public o cials with experience in the area of GPP and who exhibit a high degree of genuine acceptance of GPP. We hypothesize, however, that these o cials will tend to be concentrated in bigger municipalities, which have specialized buying departments and are able to deliver appropriate information and training for their staff. We are skeptical whether these advantages would be equally possible in smaller municipalities, which often face more severe scal stress while having weaker administrative capacities.
At the same time, in line with the tradeoff logic, we consider the GPP experience of public o cials to result in their intimate familiarity with the bureaucratic requirements of the Czech public procurement system. Reacting to these requirements, public o cials would tend to adjust their GPP decision making in such a way as to minimize the risks of administrative complications and the attendant administrative transaction costs. In practice, this means that over time, the GPP decision making will come to prioritize evaluation criteria based on the lowest price rather than adequate ecological sustainability impact. This interpretation of the meaning of experience accords with Gelderman et al.'s (2015) argument that in public service, risk aversion considerations may come to trump enthusiastic and honest effort to achieve societal goals. This interpretation thus yields a valuable contribution to scholarship underlining the importance of experience for the governance of particularly complex projects (Coviello et al., 2018), for enabling positive learning and sunk cost asymmetries (Iossa & Waterson, 2019), and for the evolution of long-term procurer-supplier relationships (Spagnolo, 2012).
Based on the conceptualization of the trade-off between stewardship and administrative compliance in the context of the decentralized governance setting of the Czech Republic, we formulate the following research questions: Loading [MathJax]/jax/output/CommonHTML/fonts/TeX/fontdata.js Page 6/23 1. Is municipality size positively associated with GPP experience and acceptance on the part of local public o cials? 2. Is previous experience with GPP associated with declining enthusiasm about it on the part of local public o cials?
In line with these questions, we expect that public procurers from larger municipalities will have greater experience with GPP and greater preference for GPP than those from smaller municipalities. At the same time, we believe that public procurers' enthusiasm about GPP will decline as they develop increasing familiarity with the bureaucratic requirements of the Czech bureaucratic procurement system.

Methods And Data
Our data come from a unique large-N survey, which took place during summer 2020. The survey was carried out with the help of an electronic questionnaire that was sent out to the o cial email addresses of all Czech municipalities, accompanied by a cover letter. The target respondents group comprised persons in charge of green public procurement implementation, a designation that is not speci ed precisely in the documentation of many organizations. Thus, respondents included politicians at the level of mayors or vice-mayors, as well as upper echelon bureaucrats at the level of department head. The exact position of respondents also depended on the size of municipalities.
Having approached 6,248 municipalities, we obtained 1,117 responses, a response rate of 17.88 percent.
The questionnaire included seven questions dealing with respondents' attitude towards green procurement. Six questions employed a Likert-type scale offering a range of ve answers from "absolutely agree" to "absolutely disagree". One question had the binary form of yes/no and another allowed the selection of an option. We also asked respondents to provide information about the size category of their municipality. See Table 1 for the complete details of the questionnaire.
The crucial part of the questionnaire included questions asking respondents to indicate their level of agreement with statements re ecting the tradeoffs affecting green procurement. These tradeoffs took account of the possibilities of a preference for the lowest price, of the risk of a higher probability of an appeal to the O ce for Protection of Competition, and a preference for particular contract criteria. The structure of the questionnaire is explained in the following Table 1. If the contract has the following evaluation criteria: "employment criterion," "criterion of the support for local companies," and "criterion of ecological impact of public procurement on the environment," then I will always (or mostly) consider "criterion of ecological impact" as most important. Pearson's Chi-square test of independence (referred to here simply as the Chi-square test) is one of the most useful and commonly used statistics for answering questions about the association between categorical variables, such as in the present case. However, while the Chi-square test describes the association between independent (categorical) variables, its value alone is unable to describe the strength of the association between them, given that its value is largely dependent on sample size, which likewise in uences whether or not a signi cant association exists between the variables. The strength of the association between such variables can be explored and described with the help of Cramer's V, which varies between zero and one without any negative values. Cramer's V is similar to Pearson's r, in that a value close to zero means no association. Furthermore, a value higher than 0.25 indicates a very strong relationship (Akoglu, 2018).

Results
Research question 1: Is the size of municipality positively associated with GPP experience and acceptance on the part of local public o cials?
As has already been mentioned, a total of 1,117 valid questionnaires were obtained. In terms of population, the size of the respondents' municipalities varied from 29 inhabitants to approximately 290,000, with an average of 3,036.222 (standard deviation 13,474.46) and a median value of 557. Source: Authors Table 3 shows the degree of respondents' agreement with speci c statements offered in the questionnaire. For all sizes of municipalities, and for most questions, respondents most often chose the option "somewhat agree," with "do not know" being the second-most popular option. Respondents are more divided over the statement, "If the contract has the following evaluation criteria: 'employment,' 'support for local companies,' and 'ecological impact of public procurement on the environment,' then I will always (or primarily) consider 'ecological impact' as the most important criterion of public procurement." Here, the most common answers encompass "somewhat disagree," "do not know," and "somewhat agree." The following table reports respondents' reactions classi ed according to municipality size. The Chi-squared test statistic p-value is larger than the signi cance level of 0.05 for only one statement, namely, "If the contract has the following evaluation criteria: 'employment criterion,' 'criterion support for local companies,' and 'criterion of ecological impact of public procurement on the environment,' then I will always (or primarily) consider 'criterion of ecological impact.'" This allows the rejection of the null hypothesis for all remaining statements, and the conclusion on this basis that respondents' answers are associated with the size of the municipalities. However, these associations are mostly weak (smaller than 0.10), with the only exception being the statement, "If I have information that a public contract with an environmental criterion increases the risk probability of an appeal to the O ce for Protection of Competition, then I will clearly prefer the public contract without environmental criterion." For this statement, the association of respondents' reactions with municipality size is moderate (larger than 0.10).
The answer to research question 1 Public procurers' experience with GPP varies according to municipality size. The procurers from larger municipalities seem be more experienced with GPP, as well as more optimistically disposed toward it. The most remarkable difference between larger and smaller municipalities concerns the tradeoff between ecological criteria and the criteria of the lowest price. With respect to this tradeoff, procurers from larger cities do not prioritize the lowest price criteria over the ecological impact, while the procurers from smaller municipalities have the opposite preference. Similar variation is observed in respondents' reactions to the question dealing with the risk of probability of an appeal to the O ce for Protection of Competition.
Research Question 2: Is previous experience with GPP associated with declining enthusiasm about it on the part of local public o cials? respondents chose the options of "somewhat agree" or "do not know" for all offered statements. As the Chi-squared p-value is smaller than the signi cance level of 0.05, respondents' reactions to all the statements are correlated with the above-noted experience, with the only exception pertaining to the statement "If the contract has the following evaluation criteria: 'employment,' 'support for local companies,' and 'environmental impact of public procurement,' then I will always (or mostly) consider 'criterion of ecological impact' as the most important criterion of public procurement." Moreover, the effect of this experience is strong (Cramer V > 0.15) in all cases where the Chi-squared p-value is signi cant. The following table shows the answers to the questionnaire sorted according to previous experience with GPP. If the contract has the following evaluation criteria: "employment," "support for local companies," and "environmental impact of public procurement," then I will always (or mostly) consider "environmental impact" as the most important criterion of public procurement. Last, but not least, a statistically signi cant group of respondents would prefer the incorporation of ecological criteria as a general obligation for suppliers (58.2% somewhat agree and 18.7% absolutely agree).

Discussion And Public Policy Recommendations
Our results reinforce street-level bureaucracy theory's insights into the adverse effects of accountability pressures and resource de cits on the implementation quality of regulatory procedures (Lerusse, Van de Walle, 2021a). We also con rm the results of Hall et al. (2016), who conclude that the centralization of administrative processes could lead to a higher uptake of green public procurement. Our study provides grounds for conjecture that the excessive decentralization in the Czech Republic presents a barrier for GPP implementation, insofar as small municipalities turn out to lack experience and capacity. These problems are exacerbated by the pervasive risk aversion of the Czech policy makers and bureaucrats who are keen on minimizing the risk of an appeal to the O ce for Protection of Competition, even at the cost of giving up on the attainment of GPP goals. In view of the complicated regulatory environment and the absence of secondary policy objectives in the Czech public procurement system, it is small wonder that our results are at variance with those of Lerusse and van de Walle (2021a) who found that public managers in Belgium, Norway, Estonia, and Germany are willing to pay more for the support of innovative ecological and social public procurement goals.
Even though our ndings yield a generally pessimistic outlook on the implementation of GPP in the Czech Republic, they point out some positive developments. We found that a signi cant amount of public procurers and mayors have positive attitudes to GPP. This is in line with Lerusse and van de Walle's (2021b) study that demonstrated similar results for waste contracting in Belgian municipalities. Moreover, a statistically signi cant part of Czech procurers and policy makers would not prioritize the criterion of the lowest price after having acquired GPP experience. At the same time, a statistically signi cant number of respondents are indifferent to such tradeoffs, a nding which could be explained by the generally low experience with GPP in the Czech Republic.
Based on these results, we can offer policy recommendations aimed at increasing the uptake of GPP. We propose that policy measures should be realized at the systemic and individual levels. At the systemic level, the key task of these measures should be to accompany the effects of what the public governance theory describes as the erosion of traditional decision-making processes and decision-making schemes (Osborne, 2010). In view of the ongoing shift from traditional vertical decision-making schemes to more deliberative horizontal schemes (Witz et al., 2021), we do not consider centralization to be an effective tool. Instead, we recommend coordination mechanisms based on municipal cooperation. In the Czech context, these mechanisms have already proven their viability in the area of municipal waste management (Soukopová & Vaceková, 2018). Inter-municipal cooperation could strengthen the administrative and scal capacity and improve knowledge sharing, especially in small municipalities with low GPP uptake. Another type of systemic policy measure could be targeted at increasing the legitimacy of GPP within the procurement system, along the classic dimensions of legitimacy such as trust, majority and morality (Witz et al., 2021). Such measures could dampen the excessive accountability requirements which fuel extreme sensitivity to administrative risks. Finally, at the individual level, public policy should give much more weight to promoting education and forging awareness of GPP bene ts.

Concluding Remarks
All over the world, sustainability goals are high on political agendas, and are actively pursued by governments through many strategies, of which GPP is becoming increasingly prominent. It is, however, becoming no less clear that the uptake and effectiveness of GPP depend not only on political ambitions but also on high-quality implementation at the street level of bureaucracy (Hall et al., 2016). Among GPP scholars and practitioners, there is a growing recognition that it is at the level of practical decision making by local public procurers that the rubber meets the road. While not much is known about the processes of this decision making (Grandia, Meehan, 2017;Tramell et al., 2019), three facts are fairly clear. First, public procurers need to deal with tradeoffs between the criteria of the lowest price and adequate ecological impact (Lerusse, Van de Walle, 2020); second, the way public procurers do so depends on their cognitive and especially affective characteristics (Grandia et al., 2015;Preuss & Walker, 2011); third, the lack of skills, expertise, and resources prevents public procurers from achieving high GPP performance.
All of these facts are borne out by the results of our large-N survey of the Czech local government o cials and mayors engaged in GPP and delineate the contours of our explanation of why the uptake of GPP in the Czech Republic has been lagging behind European standards. We have found that the decisionmaking of Czech public procurers is affected by the tradeoff between stewardship and administrative compliance, which turn out to be mutually con icting goals. On the one hand, many public procurers do possess stewardship motivation that shapes their positive attitude to GPP. On the other, they are painfully aware of, and seek to forestall, administrative risks and complications attendant on the conscientious, i.e., non-perfunctory, implementation of GPP. The overall result is that public procurers ultimately come to prioritize the contract criterion of lowest price over ecological criteria. This pattern is particularly characteristic of smaller municipalities, which have more limited access to administrative and nancial resources, quite in line with Liu et al.'s (2019) ndings about GPP in China.
Our ndings have at least three major implications for further research. In conceptual and theoretical terms, they provide new impetus for the debate between the advocates of agency and stewardship theories. While a traditional public administration approach to explain a poor track record on GPP would stress the problems of agency and opportunism (Waterman, Meier, 1998), we build on the idea of stewardship implying motivation by pro-organizational rather than personal goals (Lambright, 2009). Yet not even stewardship guarantees high performance. While some of the known problems of stewardship take the form of "honest incompetence" (Hendry, 2005), we suggest that further research could investigate an alternative phenomenon of what may be called "honest overburdening by administrative problems." This overburdening does not imply opportunism and hence does not restore the idea of agency, but does depart from the full-edged idea of stewardship, in ways that still need to be examined. In empirical terms, future research is called for to estimate and quantify precise impacts of the tradeoff between stewardship and administrative compliance on a variety of GPP indicators, at the levels of local and national government in the Czech Republic and elsewhere. This would be helpful for gaining a clearer insight into the practical and political salience of the tradeoff. Finally, in political terms, there is an urgent need for action directed at dissolving and transcending this tradeoff, in such a way that administrative compliance would no longer occur at the expense of stewardship motivation on the part of public procurers. While we have suggested some very basic policy instruments for reaching this goal, we sense that in the longer term, the only way to determine the right policy is through stakeholder discourse, which we hope our paper helps to get off the ground.

Declarations
Ethics approval and consent to participate Availability of data and materials The datasets used and/or analysed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

Competing interests
The authors declare that they have no competing interests Authors' contributions All authors contributed equally to this manuscript.