In the face of multiple crises the state returns to change the quality of markets. Regulators at the international, EU, and national level claim to transform public procurement from an instrument used to buy products to a governance tool encouraging green economies, just supply chains or innovation. These goals can easily clash with existing liberal policies and related interests that for decades had a price efficiency and competition oriented approach. This paper is interested in understanding whether the described shifts stay solely at the programmatic level, or actually translates into rules and instruments for market intervention. What is the breadth and type of changes reforming public procurement policy from the competitive price model to achieving wider societal goals via market intervention? To this aim the paper traces the quantity and quality of procurement regulation along two dimensions: policy goals and intervention types. Policy goals capture the substantive content of policy in the standards and provisions that address issues of social (e.g. insertion of minority workers), green (e.g. emission targets) and innovation oriented (e.g. R&D) procurement. Intervention type captures how a specific instrument operates during market intervention. We combine existing concepts on policy types and instruments that differentiate (non-)binding, information and reporting tools, with intervention types that are procurement specific (preferential treatment and filtration). Studying policy matrixes emerging from the two dimensions allows us to capture the emerging patterns of market intervention across countries and over time. Theoretically, we are interested in understanding which issues and which intervention types dominate in light of persistent interests and institutional complementarities that might emerge with varieties of capitalism.
