In Europe, over 250,000 public organizations spend 14 per cent of the GDP on the procurement of goods and services (Grandia, in press). They procure these goods and services, ranging from stationery to fighter planes, cleaning services and public road works, for the execution of their policies, as well as for their own operations. In many of these public organizations the role of public procurement has changed significantly over the years. Being the biggest spender in the EU allows public organizations to use their procurement to apply leverage to certain key policy objectives (Grandia, in press). Therefore, where public procurement was first only about fulfilling a specific demand and providing what the users demand in the right quantity, at the right time and in the right place, it is now often also about making sure that procurement adds value to its environment (Telgen et al., 2007). Public organizations nowadays use public procurement for a multitude of societal goals, such as minimizing long-term unemployment, improving working conditions throughout the (international) supply chain, stimulating innovation, providing opportunities for small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) or local businesses, and stimulating the market for sustainable goods and services. This development means that public procurement is no longer just a means to an end, but also a policy tool that is used to achieve desired outcomes in society. In the European Union the European Parliament and the Council of the European Union are trying to fuel this development with their new procurement directives. In 2014, they adopted new and updated EU directives on procurement. The EU member states had, until April 2016, to transpose these rules into national law, except with regard to the e-procurement rules for which the deadline is in 2018 (EU Commission, 2016). The new directives aim to diminish the administrative burden of public procurement, to create more opportunities for SMEs, and more importantly to expand the possibilities for public procurement authorities in the EU to use procurement as a policy tool (EU Commission, 2016). However, despite the increased recognition of the potential of public procurement as a policy tool for reaching desired outcomes in society, it remains an understudied topic in public sector management. Little is known about how procurement is implemented, how successful it is, what factors and actors determine its effectiveness and successfulness, and how public procurers deal with the (often conflicting) goals that they have to combine in their procurement. This special issue tries to shed some light into the usage of public procurement as a policy tool by examining the concept from different angles. The remainder of this introduction is structured as follows. Section 2 introduces the existing views on the relationship between public procurement and policy objectives. Section 3 presents the papers in the special issue. And Section 4 offers some reflections and presents an agenda for future research.