Introduction
Environmental requirements in medicines procurement are increasingly shaped by a combination of policy alignment, shared purchasing approaches, and standardised evidence mechanisms. This creates a convergence effect: once one major buyer or buyer collaboration adopts a defined requirement and verification approach, it becomes easier for other purchasers to reference the same requirement and expect the same evidence, particularly when suppliers operate globally and wish to avoid multiple bespoke submissions. The result is that procurement requirements can spread across regions even when the underlying legislation and enforcement structures remain national.
How convergence develops in practice
Convergence is often driven by three practical needs within procurement. The first is comparability: buyers need evidence that can be assessed consistently across suppliers. The second is auditability: requirements increasingly need to be verified during contract performance rather than treated as one-off tender declarations. The third is administrative efficiency: purchasers, especially those procuring high volumes across many categories, prefer evidence frameworks that can be re-used and updated rather than rebuilt for each tender.
These drivers mean that procurement tends to favour defined standards, structured disclosures, and third-party platforms that convert diverse supplier information into comparable outputs.
Regional buyer collaborations and shared tender templates
Regional collaborations act as accelerators because they standardise the questions asked and the evidence expected across multiple purchasers. In the Nordic countries, joint approaches to medicines procurement have been formalised through collaborative structures and published strategy documents that describe joint tendering procedures and shared priorities, creating a route for shared environmental criteria and shared verification expectations.
At European level, policy documents describing the medicines market environment explicitly reference cross-border procurement collaborations, including joint tendering models. Even where environmental requirements are not the primary focus of these documents, the described procurement structures provide a practical pathway for requirements to be aligned and scaled.
Global procurers and the diffusion of sustainability requirements
Global procurers can create widely visible buyer signals because they purchase at scale across many countries and operate with formalised procurement policies. UNICEF has adopted a mandatory sustainable procurement procedure that describes how sustainability considerations are integrated into procurement processes, indicating that environmental and broader sustainability requirements are treated as a defined part of procurement operations rather than an optional add-on.
In practice, the influence of global procurers is often indirect. Suppliers develop capability to respond to structured sustainability requirements for one major buyer, and that capability then becomes the basis for responding to similar requirements elsewhere. This dynamic supports convergence towards common evidence artefacts and disclosure structures.
Standard-setting as a translation layer between policy and procurement
Procurement convergence is often mediated through standards that translate broad policy goals into operational requirements. For example, WHO guidance on wastewater and solid waste management for antibiotic manufacturing explicitly identifies procurers of antibiotics and reimbursement-related decision-makers among its target audiences. This positions public guidance as a procurement-relevant reference, even where the guidance itself is not legally binding.
A similar translation function exists for sustainable procurement guidance, where buyers adopt shared frameworks to structure supplier engagement, verification, and follow-up. This standard-setting effect does not require buyers to adopt identical criteria, but it promotes common definitions and common evidence expectations.
Platform-mediated convergence through supplier assessment and disclosure systems
Supplier ratings and disclosure platforms reinforce convergence by standardising how data are collected and presented. CDP’s supply chain programme is explicitly designed to enable standardised, comparable environmental data collection from suppliers at scale. EcoVadis similarly positions its ratings as a structured way to assess supplier sustainability performance and maturity.
When large purchasers adopt these mechanisms, suppliers may face a practical expectation to maintain platform-based profiles and periodic updates. This becomes a procurement evidence channel that can be referenced across multiple tenders, reducing duplication but also reducing flexibility in how suppliers present evidence.
Signals from the United States and Japan
Convergence is not limited to European procurement. In the United States, healthcare procurement is more fragmented, but major group purchasing organisations (GPOs) and large integrated providers have developed sustainability-related supply chain approaches, including supplier criteria and environmentally preferred sourcing frameworks. These programmes indicate a buyer-driven expectation that suppliers can provide structured sustainability information relevant to purchasing decisions.
Federal procurement requirements can also influence supplier expectations more broadly. The Federal Acquisition Regulation includes provisions on sustainable procurement, and related federal rulemaking has explicitly described sustainable procurement as supporting emissions reduction and environmental stewardship objectives.
In Japan, an explicit legal and policy framework promotes green procurement by the state and other entities, supported by a “Basic Policy on Promoting Green Procurement” published in provisional translation by the Ministry of the Environment. While this framework is cross-sector rather than medicines-specific, it illustrates that public procurement is formally used as an environmental policy instrument and can therefore become a channel through which environmental requirements affect healthcare purchasing over time.
Managing divergence alongside convergence
Despite convergence pressures, meaningful differences remain across regions. Requirements may differ in scope, definitions, data boundaries, and verification expectations. For manufacturers, this often results in a two-layer evidence approach: a core global evidence set aligned to common standards and platforms, and jurisdiction-specific add-ons aligned to local legal requirements, tender templates, and contract monitoring expectations.
Summary
Procurement convergence develops when buyers need comparable and auditable evidence and prefer requirements that can be applied efficiently across many tenders. Regional collaborations can standardise requirements and accelerate adoption across several purchasers at once. Global procurers reinforce the spread of structured sustainability procurement approaches, encouraging suppliers to maintain repeatable evidence artefacts. Standards and public guidance can act as translation layers that make procurement requirements more consistent and operational. Supplier assessment and disclosure platforms further reinforce convergence by shaping the format of data collection and verification. At the same time, regional differences persist, so manufacturers increasingly need a core evidence set supplemented by jurisdiction-specific requirements.
Links
European Commission: Green public procurement, criteria and requirements.
Nordic Pharmaceutical Forum: Strategy for 2023-2025.
UNICEF Supply Division: Sustainable procurement procedure.
Scientific publications
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