The objective of public procurement is to award contracts in a timely and cost-effective manner to qualified contractors, suppliers and service providers for the process of supplying goods, services and works that support national and local government and public service activities. When the environmental impact of the goods, works or services is taken into account in the procurement process, we arrive at the notion of green public procurement, which is an effort to produce and purchase goods, services and works with a reduced environmental impact throughout their life cycle compared to goods, services and works with the same basic function that the public authorities would have procured initially. I have chosen to compare the regulatory treatment of the four key sectors of green public procurement (buildings, food and catering, road transport vehicles and energy-using products) for a number of reasons. The first reason lies in the general lack of relevant literature in this field in general. The second and more important reason is the desire to analyse in more detail the Slovenian Action Plan and the legal framework for all four sectors mentioned above, and to compare Slovenian legal and strategic documents with Croatian ones. Public procurement represents an important part of the state budget of many EU Member States. Environmental care is one of the key pillars of the European Union's further development. Taking all of the above into account, through the writing of this thesis I wanted to examine in more detail how precise and consistent Slovenia has been in developing criteria for all four key sectors of green public procurement, and how Slovenia has fared in comparison with Croatia. The results show that there is a growing trend in green public procurement in Slovenia between 2015 and 2019. The results also testify to the fact that Slovenia has a very well-developed Green Public Procurement Action Plan compared to Croatia, with criteria designed taking into account all the specificities of the procurement subjects. The main difference between the two countries is that Slovenia has taken into account the specificities of the procurement objects as well as their characteristics when designing its own criteria, which Croatia has not (yet) managed to do. Croatia has merely implemented the European criteria in its own national framework for green public procurement without attempting to take into account the specificities of national procurement objects and good and old practices from the past. The analysis carried out has thus largely highlighted the shortcomings of the Croatian system, which, as stated, is not at the level of the Slovenian one, precisely because of the failure to adapt the national criteria to the specificities of the procurement subjects
|