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The transport sector needs to become sustainable and public transport has an important role to play. Green public procurement has proven to have great potential to influence the transition to a sus...

Electric buses can improve the environmental performance of public transport. Yet, introducing electric buses brings novel challenges, such as requirements for operational changes, new forms of institutional collaboration, increased investment costs and technological concerns. This paper investigates these challenges and strategies for managing them by comparing experiences of electric bus implementation in English and Swedish cities. The comparative approach enabled us to understand the influence of governance context, organisational practices and relations between stakeholders. The comparison shows that experiences by involved stakeholders are highly context dependant. Financial and regulatory support from the national government, along with passenger demand and route characteristics had significant influence on the implementation. However, the relationship between stakeholders involved and the division of responsibility emerged as central factors to overcome challenges – the most important being the development of functioning collaboration between the stakeholders.

Green public procurement is believed to have the potential to contribute to environmental improvement and diffusion of green technologies. The aim of this paper is to compare and analyse how two Swedish regions use public procurement to promote the introduction of renewable fuels in their public bus transport systems. The method is a qualitative comparative case study, based on interviews and document studies. The paper addresses the questions of what the strategic motivations are for using public procurement to stimulate renewable fuels, and what the practical challenges have been in relation to five important factors identified from previous research: strategies, requirements, costs, size and knowledge. In one region, procurement is used in a strategic way to create a local market for biofuels, which poses higher demands on political backing, information and knowledge, the way requirements are set, and an acceptance of increased costs. In the other region, procurement is used instrumentally to increase the share of biofuels in a cost-effective way that gives room for more flexibility and reduces the demands on the procurers. This paper highlights the importance of context when assessing green public procurement schemes and analyses the case-specific influence of factors on the outcome of green public procurement.

Public procurement is widely used in order to incorporate competition into public services. Competition in procurement often leads to efficiency but the process can also raise some problems. While providing the procurement documents you do not know who will be your upcoming partner. Another aspect is how flexibility can be managed in contract design while maintaining a high service quality. The aim of this study is twofold. Firstly, the aim is to investigate how flexibility has been expressed and historically described in bus tendering documents. Secondly, to explore how the actors define or describe flexibility and its importance in tendering. Data was collected from ten years of tendering documents in the bus sector in Sweden and from interviews and a workshop. The results showed that flexibility in tendering documents has been and still is low for the operators. However, the actors wish for more flexibility and new forms of contracts can make it easier to include higher degrees of flexibility in future contracts. The paper contributes to the ongoing discussion about how to design contracts and to manage flexibility. The study has potential to create knowledge and contribute to better decision making for future procurement of bus transport.

The need to decrease emissions from the transport sector is getting urgent and public transport can play an important role in the transition to low emission fuels. To a large extent, public transport in Europe is provided by regional authorities who controls the traffic to a varying degree, from complete public monopoly to competitive tendering. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to analyse how the organisation of the public bus transport market influences the introduction of renewable fuels. The focus is on understanding what the motivation is for the use of different organisational forms and what challenges and opportunities the authorities in a region encounter during the introduction of renewable fuels. Interviews with authorities in ten Swedish public transport regions show that when functional requirements are used in competitive tendering it will exclusively result in the cheapest renewable fuel available. Thus, if new fuels or technologies should be able to enter the market, either it will be necessary for regional authorities to take more control using specific requirements or publicly management, or the national government must introduce policy instruments that enable new renewable fuels to become competitive on the market.