Barcelona launches an office to promote sustainable contracting

The initiative seeks to bring local businesses closer to a way of contracting that is more aligned with the city’s current challenges. It’s not just about choosing suppliers, but about considering the impact they generate: employment, equality, sustainability, proximity, labour rights, or emissions reduction.

The office will offer advice to small and medium-sized enterprises, self-employed professionals, and other economic agents who want to improve their contracting practices. It will also serve to guide those who wish to participate in municipal tenders and do not always know how to enter that circuit.

One of the objectives is to make it easier for more local companies to access public contracts. For many small businesses, municipal contracting can seem like a complex field, full of technical and administrative requirements. The new service aims to reduce that distance.

The project is driven by the Coordinación de Contratación Administrativa del Ayuntamiento y Barcelona Activa. The combination seeks to unite legal and administrative knowledge with business support, a key element so that SMEs are not left out due to lack of information or resources.

The criteria to be reinforced range from decarbonisation to gender equality, including the employment of vulnerable groups, the local economy, innovation, intercultural perspective, human and labour rights, or the promotion of the local language.

The office will also work internally within the Ayuntamiento de Barcelona. The municipal teams that prepare public tenders will receive training to integrate these criteria more effectively from the start, and not as a last-minute addition.

The volume of public contracting shows the importance of the change. In 2024, the Ayuntamiento de Barcelona managed €1.79 billion in municipal contracting, distributed across 38,745 contracts. This is an amount capable of influencing the city’s economic fabric if guided by strategic criteria.

For an SME, this can translate into new opportunities. For the city, it is a way to use public spending as a lever to support more responsible companies, quality employment, and services with lower environmental impact.

Barcelona also wants to strengthen its European profile in this area. The city will host the Procura+ Conference from 16 to 19 February 2027, one of the leading events on sustainable, circular, and innovative public contracting.

The congress will be held in venues such as Fabra i Coats and the Museu Marítim, and will mark Barcelona’s return to a European network where administrations, experts, and companies share experiences on how to buy better in the public sector.

The Oficina de Contractació Estratègica will not change the local economy on its own, but it can help many businesses better understand how to compete, which criteria are increasingly important, and what opportunities arise when sustainability moves from rhetoric into contracts.

In a city where SMEs and self-employed professionals support much of the daily activity, the challenge will be to ensure this service does not remain a tool just for specialists. Its real value will depend on whether it manages to reach shops, suppliers, cooperatives, service companies, and professionals who want to work with the administration without getting lost along the way.