The public sector is a major purchaser of goods and services. By setting requirements for environmental and social considerations in public procurement, an authority has the possibility to use consumer power to influence the actors in a market. The purpose of this paper is to investigate public procurement of textile products in a municipality, in order to gain knowledge about factors that may be important for the use of environmental and social criteria. Håkan Hydén´s (professor in sociology of law) norm model was used as the basis of the analysis, where the conduct was investigated along three dimensions of the norm – willingness, knowledge and system conditions – in order to identify underlying factors that can influence the process.

The results – analyzed by using interviews and documents – show that the procurer's willingness, motivation and knowledge are important factors in this context, as well as the political priority of the municipality. Procurers gain knowledge in this area to a large extent through networking with other actors. The possibilities to be able to verify the criteria are important. Verification of requirements is problematic because the municipality, as a public actor, is far from the production in the textile production chain. Lack of knowledge, in the form of mapping the textile production, prevents the development of criteria for best available technique. However, demands on manufacturing can be set indirectly by asking for some eco-labels (or equivalent) as verification. Furthermore, system conditions in terms of rules in the public procurement legislation set the framework for the procurement process.