# Green Public Procurement at a Regional Level.
## 1 Introduction  
Public authorities are one of the main consumers of products, services, and works, and can play a crucial role in making consumption more sustainable [1; 2]. Between 10% and 15% of the gross domestic product (GDP) of developed countries is allocated to public procurement [3; 4; 5; 6; 7], often linked to investments with high environmental impacts [8].  
The United Nations defined sustainable public procurement (SPP) as a 'procurement wherein an organisation uses its buying power to signal preferences to the market with its choice of goods and services that meet sustainable criteria' [9]. Environmental aspects have been gaining relevance in the public policies of the SPP [10], and giving rise to the concept of green public procurement (GPP). The European Commission defined it as a 'process whereby public authorities seek to produce goods, services, and works with a reduced environmental impact through their life cycle when compared to goods, services, and works with the primary function that would otherwise be procured' [11].  
Administrations have the potential to guide production and consumption trends by encouraging demand for environmentally friendly products and services [12; 13; 14; 15]. For this reason, interest in GPP has increased significantly in recent years [16]. And within the study of the GPP it is interesting to know the behavior of local and regional administrations, as they are very important in the volume of global recruitment and their projects have a more direct impact on the population.  
The construction sector is one of the most important sectors in terms of the total amount spent and number of employees. Although it represents slightly less than 10% of the European Union's GDP, and employs 7% of the workforce [17], it implies a considerable impact on the environment, since it consumes more than a third of the world's resources [18] and a similar percentage of the final energy in the OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development) [10].  
An analysis of the adoption of GPP can be carried out from three approaches: technical specifications; award criteria; and conditions of execution of the contract [19; 10]. Of these, the second is the most frequently used method, as it is difficult to discern whether sustainability is a minimum condition (normative), or a desire of the project promoter. The conditions of execution are usually very general and common to many [19; 20; 21].  
The main objective of this research is to analyse the greenness of bidding documents in public tendering processes of public works in the Valencia region of Spain. The results will contribute to knowledge about GPP practices and help technical staff understand the current situation when encouraging the use of environmental criteria.  
The paper is structured as follows. Section 1 presents the introduction. Section 2 describes previous research on GPP and the regulatory framework in the European Union and Spain, and defines the Valencia regional structure, and Section 3 develops the method. Section 4 shows the results, and Section 5 presents the discussion, and the results of this study are compared with results from other GPP studies. Finally, Section 6 presents the conclusions.