# Analysis of the Situation of Social Public Procurement of Works at the Valencian Region (Spain)
## 1 Introduction  
The United Nations defined Sustainable Public Procurement (SPP) as a \"procurement wherein an organization uses its buying power to signal preferences to the market with its choice of goods and services that meet sustainable criteria\" [1]. Public authorities are one of the main consumers of products, services and works; considering only developed countries, public procurement can reach between 10 and 15% of the gross domestic product (GDP) [2; 3; 4; 5; 6]. [PERSON] and [PERSON] [7] were the first authors to refer to the SPP, defining it as a concept aligned to the principles of sustainable development, to assure a strong, healthy and just society, living within the environmental limits and promoting their good functioning. SPP can become the solution to the problems generated by traditional procurement practices, since it takes into account the social, environmental and economic impact that those purchases have on the people and in the communities [8]. That is to say, it tries to optimize not only the price, the quality, the availability and so on of the products and/or services, but also the environmental life cycle impact and the social impacts related to their origin. Construction is one of the most important sectors in terms of economic volume and number of employees. It represents approximately 10% of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of the European Union (EU) and employs 7% of its total labour force [9]. In aconstruction project, procurement is employed in many of the stages, so it can constitute an adequate mechanism to integrate sustainability initiatives [10]. [PERSON] et al. [11] affirm that SPP in the construction sector shall be placed and understood within a three-dimensional framework: environmental sustainability, social sustainability and economic sustainability. Research concerning economic aspects in procurement has always been present in the construction sector, whereas research related to environmental aspects has increased in the last few years [12; 13; 14; 15; 16]. Nevertheless, social sustainability aspects are still not very present in the literature on public procurement [17; 18]. Small contracting entities such as local, provincial and regional ones, are the most adequate to improve the social aspects of their citizens due to their proximity to the population. Because of this, its results are interesting to gain an insight into the way the local, provincial and regional authorities behave in this sense. The main objective of this research is to analyse the use of social criteria in public works' tendering processes at the regional level. The results obtained are intended to contribute to a greater knowledge of SPP practices, to help the technical staff understand the current situation with a view to promoting the use of social criteria, and give more information to the administrations on the impact of public projects on the society to whom they are addressed. It will also help the promoters of the projects to align public projects to sustainable development, considering their social dimension. As a case study to illustrate this, we have chosen the Valencian region, given the availability and transparency of the data, which will enable us to have sufficient and updated information. The main contribution of this paper is, therefore, to provide a diagnosis of the current situation of the inclusion of social criteria in public works' tendering processes, to determine if that kind of criteria are usually included in the bidding documents, for what size of projects, and what specific criteria (belonging to the \"social\" category) are the most usually included in other countries and regions. The research also aims to find the percentage of inclusion of social criteria, compared to the percentages of inclusion of environmental and economic ones. The paper is structured as follows: Section 1 presents the introduction. Section 2 describes previous research on SPP and the regulatory framework in the EU and Spain and defines the Valencian regional structure.