An Introduction to Relational Procurement

“This is the first in a series of posts that explore the idea of relational integrity as a lens to consider the power dynamics and political economies of public interest digital procurement. 

Procurement is a big term. It's the broadest way to think about the process of acquiring goods and services. It’s much wider than the tactical and logistical step of purchasing. The process of procurement involves knowledge of the landscape of vendors and markets, the design and impact of the acquisition of goods and services on a wide range of actors, the work of legal contracting and negotiation, as well as the maintenance of said goods and services.

In the public sector, procurement processes are even more complex because they try and achieve hard-to-define concepts, like fairness and public interest - both in the way the purchasing process is conducted and in the resulting product or service, in addition to getting the best possible outcome for the money spent. In an effort to implement those goals, public procurement processes are also shaped by public and private policy and regulatory regimes, as well as global regimes like the World Trade Organization. The complexity involved can often mean that conversations about procurement become technocratic, legalistic, and procedural very quickly, dominating how we think and talk about what we’re trying to accomplish. 

But another way to think about procurement mechanics is through relationships. Procurement processes are designed almost exclusively to preserve fairness in relationships, particularly those with asymmetrical power dynamics. And, of course, the intended result of a procurement process is a system that - at a minimum - complies with existing laws and protections for the quality of different relationships, including privileged relationships. One of the things that we underestimate in most procurements is that not only are we procuring goods and services, we are also procuring a range of underlying relationships, each of which have their own dynamics. 

The procurement of digital products, especially communication products, intermediate relationships with important institutions, like the government, and protected services, like your doctor or lawyer. Procurement - and technology procurement in particular - is increasingly dictating the terms of our participation in our relationships with public and collective interest institutions in ways that fundamentally shape how fair and effective they are. Relational integrity (or a lack of it), like the famous quote about design, is always happening - the only question is how much intention you put into it. 

The term relational procurement is meant to serve as a lens for understanding the degree to which a procurement process (and resulting contract/relationship architecture) accounts for and/or allocates responsibility for the integrity of the underlying relationships they create or impact. It draws on specific work, such as Salome Viljoen’s work on relational data governance, focusing instead on procurement as a participatory and relational design process; and on Helen Nissenbaum and Jasmine McNealy’s work, rooted in the idea that relational integrities are enforced through contextually associated institutions and mechanisms, and that their ability to exert authority is political, contested, and based on relational associations. More broadly, the idea of relational procurement also calls in adjacent work that focuses on operationalizing approaches that center user value, values, and needs, like digital public infrastructure, civic and open technologies, comparative and multi-jurisdictional law, human-centered design, responsible and participatory technology design, and fiduciary law, among many others.  

Procurement Changes Relationship Architectures

Procurement processes, both in their execution and outcomes, change relationships. And technology is not only changing the way that procurements themselves are run, but the procurement of digital tools also materially changes the systems they’re introduced to, and the relationships they have with the people they serve. 

​​Relational integrity is an important lens through which to analyze public interest and digital procurement because of the ways that those processes change, create, and intermediate relationships, both explicitly and implicitly. A few examples of the ways that digital transformation changes and challenges traditional procurement assumptions and relationships:

Firstly, the procurement of technology products changes the dynamics of existing relationships, like the vendor/end-customer relationship. For example, most digital products are ‘never finished’ - they are constantly evolving, both in ways that are necessary to stay operational, and in ways that materially change the equity of the underlying relationship. For example, a number of digital products - from recreational apps to workplace utilities - have unilaterally altered their data use policies and introduced “AI” features, mostly without any expressed demand from users. While that’s one example, the more important dynamic is that the constant evolution of a digital product means that a procurement isn’t creating a single-point-in-time transaction, it’s creating an ongoing, shared infrastructure relationship between a wide range of highly variable users. Whereas transactional approaches to procurement make sense in cases where you’re buying a fixed number of units of a static good, like lumber or pencils, digital procurements create ongoing dependencies that require a more ongoing, relational approach. 

Secondly, the procurement of digital products creates new relationships between traditional roles.For example, the shift from transactional procurement to ongoing relationships not only changes the vendor/user relationship, it pushes the vendor between competing, often sovereign powers. Digital products can operate nearly anywhere very quickly - and, over time, different governments will require vendors to develop tools or technical standards that are, at a minimum, different from each other - and, more often, in direct competition with each other. In the same way that “digital products are never finished,” different - and often competing - requests for data, new features, and fundamental architectures, put the technology company in the position of negotiating between their often very powerful customers to deliver a singular product or service. Some technology companies have tried to federate - both through their corporate structure and/or their technology architecture-  but those approaches have been more effective at stymying anti-trust investigations than political quarrels. 

There’s a rising realization of the nationalist and political power dynamics being exercised through the technology sector - and technology companies are increasingly on the hook for answering how they will represent users’ interests without conflict (for example, with law enforcement), when they will and won’t submit to the data requests of the government in their country of origin/incorporation, and how they set labor standards across their supply chain. Again, there’s probably no greater example of these dynamics at play than the growing nationalization of AI chips, cloud services, and large language models - and the geopolitical conversation around “digital sovereignty.” While those dynamics are most visible at the international level, the very same tensions are at play with domestic and local technology providers - especially with respect to questions of political independence and protections for vulnerable communities. 

Finally, the intended outcome of a procurement is a negotiated relationship, which relies on third-party institutions to insure and enforce the commitments each party makes in the contract.   When a procurement process, or the resulting transaction, goes wrong, both parties also rely on independent institutions to resolve disputes and ensure just outcomes - which is another set of, largely unarticulated, relationships that underpin successful procurements: the relationship between each party (buyer, vendor, and user) and the institutions that enforce their contract. Not only do justice institutions represent a distinct and important externality in understanding relational integrity in-practice, but their own processes and requirements can embed a cumulative bias into how relationship integrities are prioritized and enforced. While dispute resolution is often considered in public interest procurements, it’s typically done from the perspective of efficacy for the more powerful party, as opposed to a realistic assessment of how the parties might ensure just outcomes.  

Each of these cases are ways that procurement and, especially, the procurement of digital products and systems changes, creates, and relies on relationships whose integrity are critical to the success of the underlying proposition. And yet, most procurement processes rely on traditional notions of institutional power and enforcement to ensure those basic equities, despite nearly all available evidence of ineffectiveness. Neither politically defined and constantly evolving regulatory environments, nor market-oriented government offices, who also view technology as a tool for expansion, have been reliable allies in ensuring the basic legitimacy and relational equity of technology’s use in public service. If anything, the absence of clear institutional capacity to ensure the integrity of our digitally intermediated relationships is an argument for the need, value, and timeliness of using relational integrity as a due diligence assessment framework for public procurement. 

Procurement is defined by assumed relationships

Each of the actors involved in procurement processes participates with a role, and a set of rights, that stems from their assumed relationship. On the side of those managing a procurement process, we assume buyers are looking for quality, price efficiency, and reliability of outcome. On the side of those selling, we assume they are looking for a reliable (if not continuously growing), high volume business relationship, with an (at least) fair profit margin. And if you’re a service user, we assume that you want consistency in performance, predictable and fair services, and minimal engagement beyond meeting your needs - over and above the baseline expectations of safety and local, legal compliance. While none of those perspectives is inherently unreasonable, triangulating them can be complex.The digital transformation of procurement processes, as well as the procurement of tools to support the digital transformation of existing services, has created space for different parties to design new and different architectures of relationships.  

The inputs of procurement - from trade rules to policy and regulations, and from technical requirements for the goods and services to the ongoing relationship between the parties - define an architecture that both: 

1. guides the parties in their one-off exchange, eventually leading to s business deal *and*

2. informs and impacts many relationships that exist between parties that were not directly involved in the business deal. 

As an example, in the public sector, two of the parties highly impacted by procurement without having any direct engagement with it are residents/citizens and public servants. Every stage of a procurement - from inception and competition to negotiation to implementation and enforcement - involves unique competitions, incentives, and roles. Fundamentally, procurement processes are a surface for that competition, are competitions themselves, and are an instrument through which different interests compete for power. And the role that each party plays not only determines how they are able to participate in each stage, but what rights and protections each party is able to exercise. 

On every side of a procurement, each of the parties set expectations, internally and externally. Each side vouches for their side of the relationship. Buyers make assertions about their needs, often through requests for proposal documents, which outline, among other things: the requirements that must be met to qualify as a provider of the good or service, any necessary standards or compliance measures, a summary of the problems or business cases they are seeking to have addressed, and their capacity to implement the service or product in question. Ideally, vendors commit to ensuring that their supply chain, team, and infrastructure are able to deliver the goods or services they propose - even if that commitment is aspirational at the time it was made. 

The process of procurement sets each party up as a guarantor of those promises, both to their supply chains and to each other. And, of course, even the best intentioned guarantors have to survive the world’s unpredictability. This means that, at some point, procurement processes also have to consider, and ideally plan for, what happens when things go differently than expected. 

Many procurement processes set out their dispute resolution processes - not only for disputes they anticipate, but also how the relationship will handle disputes that they don’t - in either the request for proposals (RFP) or in the contracting and/or negotiation phase. They have to consider the worst case scenario, which is how, and how well, the system they appoint (whether a court or a regulator or an arbitrator or a buyer) can guarantee or enforce the expectations and promises they make. The background threat of legal action from a supplier to a public sector buyer, for example, has long been a shadow input to the maintenance or continuation of contracts gone wrong. 

Designing relational procurement

Ultimately, the degree to which any procurement is successfully relational depends on if and how it addresses equity and power through its engagement with institutional mechanisms and/or instrumentation, and the evolution of the relationships formed or impacted by the transaction. Those approaches may start in a negotiation or a contract or a product, but they are ultimately enforced by a wide, and often disparate, ecosystem of institutions whose interests are invisible, disconnected, or entirely absent in the way that digital and public interest procurements are designed. 

A relational procurement approach offers opportunities to articulate the impacts of new approaches on relationships, both in search of transparency, fairness, and, where necessary, power rebalancing. Which isn’t to say that awareness of the disenfranchising impacts of new digital procurements or interventions has been or will, independently, be sufficient to rebalance that power - but, for reasons we’ll address throughout the series, articulating expectations and harms are critical components of making harms legible and actionable to enforcement institutions. 

While there is no single authority or approach to dispute resolution or regulation in digital and public interest procurements, there’s an extraordinary range of public and collective action efforts to establish and enforce the core integrity of the relationships they impact. 

Making procurement processes more relational can take a lot of forms, but it broadly means organizing both the processes and the resulting systems, do as much as possible to ensure the integrity of the underlying relationships. In practice, that might mean building participation for impacted communities at the conception and procurement design and budgeting stage, like community budgeting initiatives. But it could also mean involving a wide variety of stakeholder groups in the proposal review and judgement process - or ensuring that the resulting contracts include dispute resolution processes focused on fairness and accessibility. Similarly, relational procurement processes - and especially digital procurement processes - account for both the participation of constituent communities in the ongoing evolution, and accountability processes, for the resulting system. Taking a relational approach to procurement is intended to pre-emptively design for, and then ongoingly adapt to, different models of participation by embedding them in procurement processes and the resulting systems.

But there are also a wide range of examples of adversarial efforts to ensure integrity and equity in procurement-created relationships, including large public and private displays of collective action in resistance to digital transformation efforts - from industry strikes to international and domestic regulation to class action lawsuits to public inquiries, among many, many others. Each of these actions and their approach to leveraging infrastructures to practically govern the use of technology are instructive - both as elements of the power map, as operational (explicitly or implicitly) design components in a procurement negotiation, and as potential sources of historical knowledge. 

Procurement processes - and the relationships that result - not only need clear ways to navigate, problem solve, and resolve disputes between the parties themselves, they also need to clearly articulate ways that they resolve disputes when they can’t agree, didn’t anticipate the problem, and/or impact relationships in ways that weren’t accounted for by the process. The way that most procurements do this is through facilitated negotiation processes, like arbitration or mediation, and, failing that, courts. Specifically, civil courts. 

From the perspective of the procurement process, courts are a third-party externality. They are an available, but highly variable, institutional architecture they do not fund, yet rely on to ensure core integrities. Civil courts are also, in most places, extremely expensive and inaccessible, resulting in a globally documented ‘access to justice’ crisis. So the reliance of public and public interest procurement processes on civil justice as a guarantor of the integrity of their core relationships isn’t just failing in neutral ways, it’s actively embedding inequity into the public’s ability to participate in enforcing their own relational integrities. For example, how does a parent hold a teacher responsible for foisting untested, problematic technology tools onto a student in the classroom? And yet, research shows that one of the best indicators of educational success isn’t technological aptitude, it’s the quality of the parent-teacher relationship. 

Relational procurement is an exploration of what public interest and digital procurement processes can practically do - or do differently - to understand and center the equity and integrity of the relationships their work is meant to serve.