Sustainable procurement is a spending and investment process typically associated with public policy, although it is equally applicable to the private sector. Organizations practicing sustainable procurement meet their needs for goods, services, utilities and works not only on a private cost–benefit analysis, but also with the intention to maximizing net benefits for themselves and the wider world. In doing so they must incorporate extrinsic cost considerations into decisions alongside the conventional procurement criteria of price and quality, although in practice the sustainable impacts of a potential supplier's approach are often assessed as a form of quality consideration. These considerations are typically divided thus: environmental, economic and social, but it should go beyond and encompass a series of equity principles for sustainable development, such as "intragenerational equity, intergenerational equity, interspecies equity, procedural equity, and geographical equity". These can be seen as the 'sustainability pillars' of procurement, which can be underpinned by one or several instruments for development, such as those proposed by Amartya Sen: "(1) economic facilities, (2) social opportunities, (3) protective security, (4) political freedoms and (5) transparency guarantees". And to procure in a sustainable way involves looking beyond short-term needs and considering the longer term impacts of each purchase. Sustainable procurement is used to ensure that purchasing reflects broader goals linked to resource efficiency, climate change, social responsibility and economic resilience, for example.