A research agenda for green procurement of infrastructures

Construction and maintenance of road infrastructure is a major source of emissions and energy usage. Procuring green roads, however, is neither commonplace nor trivial to implement. New ways to enhance the green procurement of roads are therefore needed, and can potentially involve life cycle assessment and green labelling methods. Considering the complexity of the pavement industry sector with its many actors and structures, implementing such innovations in the procurement process is surrounded with a series of uncertainties. The current paper formulates a research agenda for green procurement of roads by looking into potential mechanisms for future procurement. Given the objective of green procurement, the paper is focusing on the question what are the short term and long term effects of potential combinations of life cycle assessment principles and procurement process structures on infrastructure costs, risks, environmental impact and the structure of the road sector. Six different approaches are presented and reviewed for relevant earlier work in the literature. Based upon the complexities found, the authors discuss the challenges in finding a matching single research method. A solution is proposed for a holistic approach using gaming simulation, since it allows evaluating the procurement of infrastructure as a complex adaptive system.