7th Public Procurement Partnership Meeting, Haarlem
On 26th - 27th November 2018, the 7th meeting of the Public Procurement Partnership took place in Haarlem, the Netherlands and the first day of the meeting was kicked off with the welcome note by Annemiek Visser, from the City of Haarlem. The meeting continued with the approval of the Action Plan by Valentina Schippers-Opejko (the Partnership Coordinator from the City of Haarlem) and Matthew Jackson (URBACT).
This time, the Partnership meeting had several important tasks: to make concrete agreements about the implementation of the Actions within the action team; to discover the new responsibilities to present European output/products; and to formulate the next steps of each Action.
With several presentations from different Partnership Coordinators, the members got insights on how to improve the strategic use of public procurement and to explore ways of making procurement works better in their cities.
During the working session, members discussed the dissemination of the output/products of the Partnership answering five questions:
- Do the Partnership Members think it is better to put all output/products into one place (website) or use different places?
- What would be the place to put the output/products in their own country in Europe?
- How would they promote the output/products of the Partnership?
- How could the Partnership make it easy to find and maintain the output/products?
- How could the Partnership finance dissemination?
By diving into different groups, members had exchanged the ideas, provided relevant remarks and found the potential solutions by the end of the first meeting day.
During the second day, the working session with the Action Teams mainly focused on the Action Plans. The Partnership decided on a number of changes regarding specific Action deliverables. Further steps towards the implementation phase, including Circular Procurement training, were discussed and will be developed in the run-up and during the 8th Partnership meeting, to be held on 21st and 22nd of January 2019 in Haarlem.