Image credits: Steve Johnson.
Last year brought the saddest news with the passing of Professor Steen Treumer after a long illness. Steen was a procurement colossus and a fantastic academic. I was extremely lucky to count him amongst my mentors and champions, especially at the very early stages of my research and academic career, before he had to take a step back to focus on his health. I am particularly grateful to him for having opened the door of the European Procurement Law Group to me. And for his generosity in providing feedback, job and promotion references, and thoughtful and clever advice without ever asking for or expecting anything in return.
It is nigh impossible to do justice to the intellectual contribution Steen made to the procurement field and the influence his approach had on the research of others such as myself. It is now a humbling honour to have been invited to contribute to an edited collection in his memory (a Mindeskrift). If he could read my contribution, I am not sure Steen would agree with what I say in the paper, but we would certainly have an interesting and stimulating discussion on the basis of the sharp comments (even some devil’s advocate ones) he would surely come up with. I hope you will find the contribution worth discussing too.
Probably unsurprisingly, the paper is entitled ‘Competition and procurement regulation: a goal, a principle, a requirement, or all of the above?’ and its abstract is below. In the paper, I use the background of recent developments in UK and EU case law, as well as the UK’s procurement rulebook reform process, to reframe the issue of the role of competition in procurement regulation. While I do not provide any insights I had not already developed in earlier writing, I bring some scattered parts of my scholarship together and hopefully clarify a few things along the way. The paper may be particularly interesting to those looking for an entry point to the discussion on the role of competition in public procurement, but hopefully there is also something for those already well versed on the topic. As always, comments most welcome: a.sanchez-graells@bristol.ac.uk.
In this contribution, I reflect on the role of competition in public procurement regulation and, more specifically, on whether competition should be treated as a regulatory goal, as a general principle of public procurement law, as a specific (implicit or explicit) requirement in discrete legal provisions, or all of the above. This is an issue I had the pleasure and honour of discussing with Professor Steen Treumer back in 2009, when I was a PhD student visiting the Copenhagen Business School. While Steen never revealed to me what he really thought, his probing questions continue to help me think of this issue, which remains at the core of my research efforts. This contribution shows that the role of competition keeps cropping up in procurement regulation and litigation, as evidenced in recent UK developments. This is thus an evergreen research topic, which were Steen’s favourites.
The full citation is: Sanchez-Graells, Albert, ‘Competition and procurement regulation: a goal, a principle, a requirement, or all of the above?’, to be published in Steen Treumer’s Mindeskrift edited by Carina Risvig Hamer, Erik Bertelsen, Marta Andhov, and Roberto Caranta (Ex Tuto Publishing, forthcoming 2022). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4012022.