Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Public procurement, the purchase of goods and services by government, has long been used in the U.S. to achieve multiple public policy goals. Since the 1960’s, federal, state, and local governments have used their procurement power to help reduce income inequality and address past discrimination in government contracting by including targets for women and minority-owned businesses in government procurement contracts. In the first part of this paper, I discuss the development, prevalence, and legal challenges to the use of government procurement policy to achieve social equity policy goals by local U.S. governments. In the second part of this paper, I examine three cases of water infrastructure construction using a value chain analytic framework (Gereffi, Humphrey, & Sturgeon, 2005) to understand where women and minority-owned businesses have been successfully included in the design, construction and maintenance of municipal water infrastructure contracts. I conclude with an examination of possible explanations for the variation in success across and within cases, and discuss areas for future research.  Data collection and analysis is facilitated by the use of NVivo, a qualitative research data management and analysis software program.

Examining public procurement offers a tremendous opportunity for scholars interested in social equity and the role of the state to better understand how governments use their procurement power to achieve a range of economic, social, and environmental policy goals. The contribution of this study to the public policy and management literature is to better understand how local U.S. governments use procurement to achieve social equity goals and why they have been successful.