Extent of Integration of Environmental, Economic, And Social Sustainable Public Procurement Practices In Lake Victoria South Water Services Board (Lvswsb), Kenya

Abstract

Sustainable procurement has close connection to sustainable development. It advocates for acquisition and disposal practices that maximise economy and facilitate economic development while having little or no negative environmental impacts.However, the problem is lack of sustainable procurement practices amongst the public entities in Kenya and for the entities that try to incorporate sustainability within their practices, the extent of integration still needs some upgrading owing to the fact that only one or two of the sustainability pillars, economic, environmental, and social, are incorporated instead of the three. Despite many studies on the concept of sustainable procurement practices, most of the studies have only focused on one or two of the aspects of the practices. Hence, there is a need to establish the extent of integration of environmental, economic, and social sustainable public procurement practices in Kenya from the case study of Lake Victoria South Water Services Board (LVSWSB). The objectives of the study are to establish the extent of environmental sustainability, examine the extent of social sustainability, and determine the extent to which economic sustainability are all integrated within the public procurement practices at the LVSWSB. On this respect, the conceptual framework looks at public procurement as the dependent variable and environmental, social, and economic sustainability aspects as the independent variables. A descriptive survey research design targeting a population size of 144 participants was used in the study. A total of 106 participants were used as the representative sample. Determination of the adequacy was based purely on judgment and experience in the said field of study. Through the use of questionnaires and other secondary sources, the study obtained the required data. In order to enhance the reliability and validity of the questionnaires, the study performed a test and retest process. On the item level, the correlations ranged between 0.6 and 0.8. The overall reliability of total retest scores was 0.84. When stratified by water service providers, subcounty water officers, LVSWSB contractors, and LVSWSB head office, the total score reliability approximated 0.80 for all the categories. Based on the results, the study established that environmental sustainability had a mean of 3.01, economic sustainability . had a mean of 3.54, and the social sustainability had a mean of 3.67. It means that the extent of integrating economic and social sustainability is higher than the integration of environmental sustainability in the board. In this respect, the study recommends that all the three pillars should be adequately integrated within the procurement process.