October 5, 2026 – 9:00 Eastern US – 15:00 CET
Join George Washington University Law School (GW Law) and the University of Turin for a free one-hour webinar on the EU’s most important procurement reforms in over a decade.
On September 9, 2026 the European Commission is scheduled to publish sweeping changes to the rules that govern EU procurement. (A draft version of the proposed changes was available several months earlier.) These massive reforms (the first since 2014) will likely reach across the European continent and beyond, to affect the EU Member States, the European Free Trade Association (EFTA) states and many of the nations that have trade and association agreements affecting procurement in place with the European Union.
The EU reforms cover key areas of modern procurement — competitive methods, data transfers and strategic autonomy — which will be addressed by our international panel.
International Panelists
Topic 1: Competitive Methods
To foster emerging technologies — and encourage more flexible buying — the new EU procurement rules will launch a new competitive method, the “open-negotiated procedure.” Gian Luigi Albano (Consip S.p.A. and Agenzia del Demanio (Italy)) (invited) will discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the EU’s new approaches to competition, and how they can facilitate procurement for innovation.
Resources
- Gian Luigi Albano, The Open-Negotiated Procedure and the Limits of the Flexibility Narrative – A First Reading of the European Commission’s Leaked Public Procurement Regulation, with Italy as the Empirical Test Case — From the abstract: This note examines the European Commission’s leaked draft Public Procurement Regulation of July 2026, and asks whether the diagnosis behind its central innovation, the open-negotiated procedure, survives contact with the evidence usually invoked for it. We argue that the rigidity narrative driving the reform conflates two different statistics, procedures counted and procedures valued, and that Italian data for 2025 show these pointing in opposite directions so that the reform is sized for the smaller of the two problems. We then read the open-negotiated procedure against its closest American analogue, negotiated award under Part 15 of the Federal Acquisition Regulation, and find not a shared logic but two different ways of disciplining discretion, one built ex ante into the structure of the procedure and the other left to ex post review, with the European draft borrowing the flexibility of the second before it has built the apparatus that makes that flexibility safe. Evidence from the European Court of Auditors on a decade of buyer behaviour under the current, already permissive regime suggests the constraint on quality-weighted awarding has been behavioural rather than legal, a constraint the draft’s central instrument does not address and may worsen. Game-theoretic considerations bearing on the internal design of multi-stage negotiation are set out separately as a preliminary sketch for a paper this series will devote to the subject. (Archive copy)
Topic 2: Data Transfers
Luca Martinelli (European Commission) will discuss the European Union’s plan for a common data space that will — among other things — make it far easier to address contractor qualifications, and so to exclude bad contractors.
Resources
- Karolis Granickas, Open Contracting Partnership, A digital backbone for EU’s procurement vision: Our take on the current regulation draft (3 Aug 2026) (“Europe does not often get the chance to rewrite its procurement rulebook from first principles. We . . . believe this is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to fundamentally reform how procurement is run across the EU, to move it from a paper-based, compliance-driven chore to an intelligent, user-friendly digital service that boosts European innovation and economic inclusion.”).
United Nations Office on Drugs & Crime, Open Contracting in ASEAN Member States: Legal and Regulatory Review (2026). Abstract: This report assesses the legal and regulatory foundations for open contracting in the eleven Member States of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). It examines how procurement frameworks, e-procurement initiatives and anti-corruption mechanisms can be adapted for open contracting, and how the ASEAN Member States can strengthen their systems to advance integrity in public spending and reinforce public trust.
Topic 3: Strategic Autonomy
The European Union and its partners have found it increasingly difficult to secure supply chains in a global, often hostile economy. Marko Turudic (University of Zagreb) and Roberto Caranta (University of Turin) will discuss the EU’s approaches to strategic autonomy in international trade and procurement.
Resources
- Roberto Caranta, Local content and local value in EU public procurement procedures, Közbeszerzési Jog (Public Procurement Law) 2026/3 – Tanulmány, DOI: 10.55413/193.A2600301.KOJ (in English and Hungarian). Abstract: Pursuing local content or local value is against EU public procurement law. However, EU law already accommodates some possibilities to legitimately engage in sound procurement practices and/or pursue wider societal interests that may incidentally be beneficial to local economies, thus enhancing local value. Those possibilities should be expanded in the forthcoming reform without agonising about otherwise elusive cross-border procurement. Nor should concerns about corruption and other abusive practices deter from sound and legitimate buying practices, sclerotising award procedures across the EU.
- Roberto Caranta, Of many sticks and a mutant carrot: the new external dimension of EU public contracts, in W. Janssen, F. Lichère and K-M. Magga (eds.), Reforming EU Public Procurement. Proposals for the Reform of Directive 2014/24/EU (Cheltenham, Elgar Publishing, 2026) 150-168. Abstract: In a changing global trade law context, the EU is increasingly using public contracts to ensure reciprocal market access with third countries and to fight against unfair competitive practices of those same countries. In this context, the recent case law of the CJEU has left to each contracting authority or entity to decide on whether economic operators from third country not having a reciprocal market opening agreement with the EU (non-covered economic operators) may be allowed or not to participate in their public procurement procedures and in case to devise “adjustments” consequent to that participation. This is hardly workable, and in the context of the forthcoming reform EU rules should be adopted to better guide those contracting authority and entities in dealing with third countries economic operators.
- Marko Turudić, Is there a Place for Local Content Requirements in EU Public Procurement? (23 Dec. 2025). Abstract: Local content requirements (LCRs) represent the practice of prioritising domestic economic inputs within the national market. In the context of public procurement, this approach is typically observed when preference is given to local resources and economic operators during the evaluation and scoring of tenders, or even when only local economic operators are allowed to participate in the public procurement procedure. This Chapter examines the potential for incorporating LCR provisions within EU public procurement procedures. The analysis is divided into two main perspectives. Firstly, it considers the concept of LCRs and the feasibility of implementing such provisions from the standpoint of individual Member States. Secondly, it explores the issue at the broader EU level, evaluating the compatibility and implications of LCRs within the framework of European Union regulations and policies.
- Marko Turudić, Exclusive Competence Without Comprehensive Legislation: The Constitutional Deficit in the Treatment of Third-Country Economic Operators in EU Public Procurement (7 July 2026). Abstract: The Court of Justice for the European Union confirmed in Kolin (C-652/22) and Qingdao (C-266/22) that third-country economic operator access to EU public procurement falls within the EU’s exclusive competence under the common commercial policy, while establishing problematic transitional rules. Yet the EU has not exercised this competence comprehensively. This paper argues that the result is a constitutional deficit. Drawing on pre-emption under Article 2(1) TFEU, the effectiveness of the common commercial policy, sincere cooperation under Article 4(3) TEU, and the right to effective judicial protection under Article 47 CFREU — the paper demonstrates that this deficit is incompatible with the constitutional principles that justify the conferral of exclusive competence. It proposes a four-element legislative framework: transparent admission discretion, mandatory score adjustments within a legislated range, removal of the undefined ‘differential treatment arrangements’ that paragraph 64 of Kolin establishes, and full public procurement remedies for admitted third-country operators as required by Article 47 CFREU.
- Christopher Yukins & Allen Green, International Trade Agreements and U.S. Procurement Law, Chapter 9 to The Contractor’s Guide to International Procurement (American Bar Association 2018) (Erin Loraine Felix & Marques Peterson, eds.).
Professor Marko Turudić explained why he has launched his forthcoming book with Edward Elgar Publishing, “Strategic Autonomy and Public Procurement – Using Public Procurement to Achieve Economic, Industrial, Digital and Defense Autonomy”:
Geopolitical realities have shifted significantly over the last five years. Some of the things governments worldwide once took for granted – like the steady march towards free and fair global markets – have been all but abandoned. International trade continues to be weaponized to coerce governments and organizations into political concessions.
Against this changing backdrop, the EU has started to push back by using its vast market as a tool to achieve autonomy. In the past few years, we have witnessed a steady stream of new legislative and policy acts aimed at instrumentalizing the internal market: the Anti-Coercion Instrument, the draft Industrial Accelerator Act, the ReArm Europe Plan/Readiness 2030, the SAFE instrument, and the Tech Sovereignty Package. One of the most important tools these acts attempt to leverage is public procurement.
As a result, EU public procurement is being given another layer of complexity, another set of goals to achieve – and the aim of this book is to establish whether this can be done effectively. By defining what strategic autonomy actually means, analyzing these new legislative tools, and engaging with broader concepts like “Buy European” and local content from a Member State perspective, this book aims to give readers useful insights into the new EU public procurement reality.
This book is a direct continuation of my previous work on third-country economic operator access to the EU public procurement market. One of the organizing themes of that book was “reciprocity” in international trade as it applies to public procurement, but a series of related concerns ran alongside it: protectionism, the safeguarding of the EU’s industrial base, and the pursuit of a genuine level “playing field” by neutralizing the advantage enjoyed by heavily and nationally subsidized economic operators, among many others. As I was completing that book, these themes ceased to be peripheral. In parallel, they became more and more relevant as the geopolitical landscape began to shift, especially from 2024 onwards. This book follows them to the center of EU economic policy, where they now sit.