The Two Roles of Procurement in the Transition Towards Digital Public Governance : Procurement as Regulatory Gatekeeper and as Site for Public Sector Experimentation

This paper explores the position of public procurement in the broader transition towards digital public governance. First, the paper identifies how, in the context of the global ‘race to AI’, procurement is being assigned a gatekeeping role to discipline the adoption and use of digital technologies by the public sector to promote goals such as transparency, trustworthiness, or explainability. The paper stresses the difficulties stemming from the incommensurability of some of such putative goals of digital regulation, as well as the constraints stemming from the need for technical, economic, and contextual judgements in the operationalisation of some other goals. This suggests that procurement will not properly function as a tool of digital regulation. Second, the paper frames procurement as a site of technological experimentation, as procurement is itself an area of public sector activity currently undergoing digitalisation. Digital procurement thus offers a useful case study to understand the broader challenges, issues, and limitations in the leveraging of procurement to regulate public sector digitalisation and to test the submission that procurement will not properly function as a tool of digital ‘regulation by contract’