Procurement Notice

The APO is advancing the development of the Green Productivity 2.0, or GP 2.0, ecosystem to provide its member economies with practical, evidence-based tools for integrating productivity improvement with environmental sustainability.

One of its key components is the APO GP 2.0 Mapping—an interactive online platform designed to present and track policies, strategies, legislation, programs, and institutional initiatives relevant to GP across APO member economies. The platform is intended to provide policymakers, researchers, businesses, productivity practitioners, and other stakeholders with structured, comparable, and up-to-date information on national sustainability priorities, policy implementation, and progress of each economy over time.

The GP Mapping aims to provide users with a comprehensive grasp of policies related to the environment, sustainability, GP, and the circular economy in APO members. Built to be easily updated to capture the latest policy details while archiving past details, the GP Mapping also aims to serve as an archival tool enabling researchers to study trends in sustainability policy formulation.

For more details, the PN and Implementation Procedures.

The policy landscape for sustainability, climate, energy efficiency, resource efficiency, circular economy, sustainable finance, and green industrial transformation is expanding rapidly. Governments are introducing and revising net-zero targets, green-growth strategies, carbon pricing instruments, energy-efficiency rules, extended producer responsibility schemes, green taxonomies, and related implementation programs.

At the same time, fragmentation of official sources, differences in terminology and policy status, frequent revisions, language barriers, and uneven availability of comparable data make it difficult for policymakers and productivity practitioners to understand the state of Green Productivity-related policy across member economies.

Recent global evidence reinforces the need for credible, comparable policy intelligence: UNEP’s Global Resources Outlook 2024 reports that natural resource extraction has tripled over the past five decades and could rise by 60% by 2060 without urgent action. This underlines the importance of linking productivity improvement with resource efficiency and circularity.

The GP 2.0 Mapping should therefore function not only as a dashboard but as a living evidence base: a curated, source-verified, updateable, and analytically useful knowledge infrastructure that helps APO members identify policy gaps, benchmark progress, design interventions, and support the broader GP 2.0 Ecosystem.

The APO intends to engage a qualified institution to provide specialized technical support for methodology refinement, cross-country policy research, validation, data structuring, and visualization support for GP 2.0 Mapping.

The selected institution should demonstrate strong competence in multicountry sustainability policy analysis, regulatory intelligence, data-quality assurance, source verification, cross-country comparability, and communication of complex policy information for decision-making.

The existing prototype platform would be provided to the selected institution and serve as primary reference for understanding how the information is currently organized and should, where practical, be used as the basis for future enhancements. While the expert is encouraged to recommend improvements to the methodology, taxonomy, analytical framework, information architecture, and presentation, recommendations should, wherever feasible, align with the existing platform structure to support efficient implementation and avoid unnecessary redevelopment. The verified information and proposed methodology would be submitted to the APO using the agreed reporting formats, together with the relevant references and supporting source links. Following internal review and validation, the APO would remain responsible for uploading and publishing approved content on the platform; direct website administration would not form part of the expert’s assignment.

The proposed assignment would principally involve:

• ・Reviewing the existing mapping approach, structure, taxonomy, indicators, and information fields of the prototype platform;
• ・Proposing and developing a rigorous, practical, and replicable methodology for the GP 2.0 Mapping, including the conceptual framework, scope, policy-selection criteria, classification system, data sources, validation procedures, quality-assurance standards, update cycle, and approach to cross-country comparability;
• ・Defining clear criteria for determining the relevance of policies, strategies, laws, programs, and initiatives to GP;
• ・Recommending an appropriate analytical framework for presenting both qualitative policy information and, where feasible, relevant quantitative indicators;
• ・Reviewing and verifying the accuracy, relevance, and currency of the information currently included in the platform;
• ・Identifying important policies, strategies, laws, regulations, programs, and initiatives of 20 APO member economies that are missing, newly introduced, revised, superseded, or no longer in effect (Bangladesh, Cambodia, the Republic of China, Fiji, India, Indonesia, the Islamic Republic of Iran, Japan, the Republic of Korea, Lao PDR, Malaysia, Mongolia, Nepal, Pakistan, the Philippines, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Turkiye, and Vietnam);
• ・Preparing concise and objective English summaries based primarily on official government, intergovernmental, or recognized institutional sources for each economy;
• ・Recording original-language policy titles and providing accurate English translations where an official English title is unavailable;
• ・Compiling structured information on each policy, including its title, category, objectives, scope, implementation status, responsible institution, timeframe, targets or indicators, relevance to GP, official source links, verification date, and explanatory notes for each economy;
• ・Identifying inconsistencies, duplication, information gaps, broken source links, and areas requiring further verification; and
• ・Preparing methodological guidance and recommendations to support consistent future updating, validation, and expansion of the platform across all APO member economies.

Minimum required deliverables

• ・Kick-off meeting summary with detailed workplan, timeline, roles, risks, and quality-review/validation approach.
• ・Policy Mapping Methodology and Classification Framework, including policy-selection criteria, source hierarchy, taxonomy, data fields, status definitions, validation rules, comparability principles, and update protocol.
• ・Policy Research and Data-entry Template in Excel, including mandatory fields, source links, verification date, country/economy tags, policy category, status, responsible institution, implementation period, targets/indicators, GP relevance, and explanatory notes.
• ・Consolidated Draft Policy Mapping and Validation Workbook covering the 20 member economies and recording source quality, verification status, coverage gaps, and issues requiring validation.
• ・Final Reviewed Policy Mapping Database in a format ready for APO internal review and upload by the Secretariat.
• ・Final Methodology and Scope Coverage Note documenting limitations, source assumptions, treatment of gaps, quality-control process, and recommendations for future scaling.
• ・Final Policy Mapping Results Deck with concise findings and at least 8-10 graphs, metrics, or visualization-ready outputs to support country profiles and comparative views.
• ・Ongoing Policy Monitoring Recommendations Brief covering update frequency, roles, source monitoring, change logs, version control, and future member-government validations.
• ・Results-sharing session to present methodology, findings, limitations, and practical implications for the GP 2.0 Ecosystem.

Acceptance criteria

• ・All outputs must be in English, editable format, internally consistent, and supported by authoritative source records.
• ・Each policy entry must have a traceable source link or documented source limitation, verification date, and policy status.
• ・The database must be free of material duplication, unsupported claims, broken critical links, and unexplained inconsistencies at final submission.
• ・Final payment should be linked to APO’s acceptance of complete deliverables, not merely to submission.

The institution should propose a rigorous, practical, and replicable methodology that can be applied consistently across economies while recognizing differences in legal systems, policy instruments, language, and institutional arrangements.

• ・Prioritize official government sources, legal/regulatory repositories, national strategies, gazettes, ministerial websites, intergovernmental sources, and recognized institutional sources.
• ・Use secondary sources only for source discovery or documented gap-filling, and clearly mark any entries that require further validation.
• ・Apply a documented quality-review process covering source quality, translation checks, classification consistency, status verification, duplicate detection, and cross-economy comparability.
• ・Maintain a source log and change log so the GP Mapping can be updated as a living policy-intelligence platform.
• ・Disclose any use of AI-assisted research tools, automated scraping, translation tools, or third-party databases, and ensure that any such use does not compromise confidentiality, source accuracy, or intellectual-property compliance.

1. 1. Cover letter of interest (Annex 1).
2. 2. Basic organizational details if applicable (Annex 2).
3. 3. Profile of the organization if applicable (maximum 1 A4-sized page).
4. 4. Experience in conducting research in similar areas (Annex 3).
5. 5. Financial proposal to indicate the cost of services (Annex 4).
   1. 5.1 Total costs and breakdowns for conducting the research should be given only in US dollar amounts.
   2. 5.2 All national taxes and levies applicable should be stated and   included in the total costs. The APO will consider the inclusive costs as the final quoted prices when evaluating proposals.
   3. 5.3 All rates and costs quoted in financial proposals should be written in both numeric and alphabetic forms, e.g., USD2,500 (two thousand five hundred US dollars).

Download: Annexes.

1. 1. Proposals with all required information specified should only be sent via email in password-protected PDF file attachments signed by authorized representatives no later than 10:00AM (Japan Standard Time), Wednesday, 21 October 2026 to rminamoto@apo-tokyo.org and mkaga@apo-tokyo.org.
2. 2. The subject line of the email message should be:
   Proposal for Research on Mapping Green Productivity Initiatives in APO Members for Green Growth by <Institution name>.

Recommended weighted criteria for evaluation or negotiated assessment:

• ・Technical understanding and methodology, including GP relevance, source hierarchy, classification, QA, validation, and comparability approach – 30%.
• ・Relevance of experience in sustainability policy research, regulatory intelligence, cross-country databases, visualization, and work with public/international organizations – 20%.
• ・Quality, practicality, and completeness of deliverables, timeline, workplan, and risk-management arrangements – 15%.
• ・Team qualifications, availability, regional knowledge, and project-management structure – 15%.
• ・Data governance, source documentation, intellectual-property protection, confidentiality, and quality-control safeguards – 10%.
• ・Financial proposal, value for money, clarity of assumptions, and alignment of payment milestones with accepted outputs – 10%.

Only the selected institution will be notified by email within one month of the submission deadline or completion of the negotiated assessment process.

• ・The APO reserves the right to annul the RFP or the vendor selection process, or to accept or reject any or all proposals in whole or part at any time without stating any reason and without incurring any liability to the affected institution.
• ・The APO is not obligated to respond to any objections or to inform the affected institution of the grounds for such decisions.
• ・The APO also reserves the right to change the scope of work in case of need or depending upon changes in requirements before or during the implementation phase. However, if changes are made during the implementation phase, the APO will negotiate the costs for the additional work separately with the institution.

• ・The APO will not bear any costs related to the research, planning, design, or any other such activity related to the preparation of proposals in response to this RFP by institutions for sending proposals to the APO.
• ・The APO may, at its own discretion, extend the submission deadline by notifying all bidders of the extension in writing. Any proposal received after the deadline will be rejected.

A prospective institution requiring any clarification of this document, or the process itself, shall submit its queries in writing only to the following email addresses:

Catalyst and Strategic Support Department
Asian Productivity Organization (APO) Secretariat
1-24-1 Hongo, Bunkyo, Tokyo 113-0033, Japan
Email: rminamoto@apo-tokyo.org and mkaga@apo-tokyo.org