Date: 7th of December 2021
Time: 10:35am to 12:00pm
Venue: Storey Hall, RMIT
Session Type: Panel
Participants: Sue Boyce (AbilityWorks), Dr Warren Staples (University of Melbourne), Paul Ashby (Aurecon, waiting for his confirmation), Dr Joanne Meehan (University of Liverpool, UK) and Sebastian Conley (Transurban)

The panel will be moderated by Dr Kevin Argus (RMIT) and Dr. Natalya Turkina.

 Dr Natalya Turkina

Vice Chancellor's Postdoctoral Fellow at RMIT,

Graduate School of Business and Law

Natalya has 10+ years of professional experience in the Research and Education, Business and Government sectors in Europe and Australia. She is passionate about research in the areas of Social Entrepreneurship, Stakeholder Engagement, Cross-Sector Partnerships, Corporate Social and Environmental Sustainability and Responsibility. In her research, Natalya critically looks at how international and national institutional contexts condition the ways organisations and individuals understand and practice business sustainability and responsibility. Her research projects are international and comparative in their nature and involve national contexts of such countries as Australia, Indonesia, Mongolia, Russia and Botswana. In her work, Natalya aims to translate her theoretical and practical knowledge and teaching experience into ethical and sustainable business praxis.

Topic: “Beyond ‘Box-Ticking’: Institutional Challenges and Opportunities for Australian Social Procurement”.

Synopsis: The COVID-19 crisis has significantly hit Australia, bringing in the first economic recession since the 1990s along high un- and under-employment rates, especially amongst the vulnerable, disadvantaged, or marginalised groups of people (e.g., women and youth at risk, refugees and migrants, people with disabilities, indigenous people). To recover from this crisis, the Victorian Government has prioritised social procurement as a promising strategy for creating meaningful long-term employment. Social procurement is a framework for organisations to use their buying power to generate social value for local communities above and beyond the economic value of goods or services being purchased. This can be achieved via direct procurement from social enterprises or by including social impact or employment assessment in the tender requirements. However, Australian firms tend to take a short-term ‘box-ticking’ approach to social procurement by merely complying to minimum contractual requirements instead of creating meaningful long-term business and employment opportunities in the local communities. During this Panel discussion, we will discuss what institutional (i.e., political, cultural, financial) challenges inform such a ‘box-ticking’ approach and what institutional opportunities lie ahead of Australian social procurement.