Global Government Procurement Governance and the Covid-19 Pandemic

We question whether global government procurement governance broke down during the COVID-19 pandemic, by examining the consistency of state government procurement responses with international treaty obligations. Public procurement played a vital role in government responses to the pandemic, with states often bypassing standard domestic procurement rules and procedures to obtain urgently needed health-related supplies and vaccines. Through a comparison of common state procurement responses with the emergency-related provisions in five major international treaties, we find that states generally implemented their procurement under temporary emergency rules and regulations without breaching their international commitments. We argue that the global government procurement regime was largely able to accommodate state responses to the pandemic due to the high degree of national policy space built into it. Although the trend towards increased regulatory policy space in international economic treaties was evident prior to the pandemic, the pandemic reinforced the need for flexibility mechanisms that enable states to respond urgently to unexpected emergency situations such as the pandemic without violating their international obligations. Our findings suggest that regulatory policy space is essential to the resilience of the global government procurement order along with the maintenance of the basic norms/principles of competitive procurement. This case study contributes to the broader discussion of the resilience of the international economic legal order.