Aspects of sustainable procurement practices by public and private organisations in Saudi Arabia: an empirical study

While Saudi Arabia has demonstrated tremendous efforts in achieving the objective of sustainable development by encouraging sustainable procurement practices by the public and private organisations, there still exist significant hurdles blocking the full implementation of these practices. This study is an effort to empirically investigate the aspects of sustainable procurement practices by Saudi Arabian public and private organisations, particularly the nature, extent and main barriers to implementing those practices at the organisational levels. It also determines and analyses the relationship between an organisation’s, whether public or private, sustainable procurement practices and the barriers to implementing those practices. Using a structured questionnaire survey with 202 procurement directors/senior managers of those Saudi Arabian organisations, we employed multivariate and multiple regression techniques to achieve the study objectives. Our empirical results suggest that regardless of the ownerships and types of organisations, the current state of sustainable procurement practices seems overly negative, and the attitudes of top management as well as the cultural aspects of the organisations pose the main barriers to effectively implementing sustainable procurement practices at the organisational levels. We believe that this study provides an important benchmark whereby one could measure the progress of sustainable procurement practices at the organisational levels, particularly in Saudi Arabia. Depending on the similarity of the aspects of the organisations in other countries with those in Saudi Arabia, the benchmark would have wider applicability.