Professional Summary
- Barbara was Monitoring and Evaluation Officer at the EU Agency Eurofound in Dublin (Ireland) since 2007 until her early retirement from the agency in October 2023.
- She developed the agency’s Monitoring & Evaluation function and conducted tasks ranging from designing its M&E system and strategy, implementing its evaluation programme through commissioning, procuring and contract-managing externally conducted evaluation assignments (including designing and managing EU inter-agencies framework contracts), and conducting internal evaluations, as well as monitoring, reporting and learning tasks.
- She was an active founding member of the EU Agencies’ “Performance Development Network” (PDN) and chaired its “evaluation” working group on several occasions (2012-2017, and 2021-2022).
- Based on her familiarity with evaluation in EU institutional contexts, and her continuing PhD research she will be able to contribute to EES’ efforts to stimulate debate and development in public policy areas via policy connecting policy makers, evaluators and policy research organisations.
- She is a member of the European Evaluation Society since 2008 and has actively contributed to many EES biennial conferences over the years.
- In 2022, she took the initiative to set up the most recent EES Thematic Working Group 8 “Systems approaches in evaluation”, which she co-leads together with co-founder Kirsten Bording Collins. This working group is very active and continually growing. TWG8 is designed as a community of practice, and implements its annual work plan through self-organising practice groups on chosen topics, as well as holding bi-monthly online meetings, contributing to EES Conferences, and forging networking connection and collaboration with other networks and groups elsewhere working on related topics (e.g. AEA SETIG, IEAc, and systems science organisations).
- As an evaluation practitioner, she has contributed to the development of evaluation practice and culture in EU agencies, notably through the work in the EU Agencies’ (EUAN) Performance Development Network (PDN) and establishing and chairing its working group on evaluation. In this capacity, she has for example contributed to the development of a handbook on evaluation for EU agencies for the PDN (available to EU agencies) and promoting the importance of evaluation within the performance monitoring frameworks in EU agencies.
- Throughout her evaluation practice, she has developed an increasing frustration with some of the shortcomings of institutionalised evaluation approaches faced with the challenges of increasingly complex contexts in which evaluation has to operate. Equipped by her post-graduate studies of systems thinking and practice applied to evaluation practice since 2012, she continues to advocate for more systemic evaluation, including to her current PhD research. In recent years, she has regularly presented on this topic at EES and other evaluation conferences, and has published about this, for example here.