Motivations and barriers to social procurement in the Australian construction industry

Social procurement involves the use of procurement to leverage social benefits in the supply chain, above and beyond the normal purchasing of construction products and services. Social procurement is growing in importance as public and private sector clients around the world include social value creation imperatives in their construction contracts. Through interviews with eight major contractors from the Australian construction industry the motivations behind social procurement and the barriers to implementation are explored. The results reveal a compliance-based culture which is largely a mechanistic response to regulatory and market regimes. The main challenges revolve around the lack of social value creating capacity in existing supply chains and in identifying appropriate and reliable social benefit organisations which understand the needs, culture and operational practices of the construction industry and of sufficient scale to work on large construction projects. Social benefit organisations are widely seen as a risk rather than an asset and best confined to low risk, low skilled, non-critical and off-site activities. The barriers facing these organisations in penetrating the industry are also formidable.