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Barbara Befani

Research Director, Centre for Evaluation, National Centre for Social Research

Barbara specialises in innovative methods for theory-based impact evaluation and holds a (European) PhD in Socio-Economic and Statistical Studies (thesis in Evaluation Methodology) as well as a MSc in Social Statistics.

Formerly a Research Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies, Research Fellow at the University of Surrey, and Research Associate at the University of East Anglia, Barbara has 20 years of experience in evaluation research, training and consultancy. Her fields of expertise span set-theoretic and probabilistic approaches (QCA and Process Tracing / Bayesian Updating); methodological appropriateness, or criteria to select methods and approaches in impact evaluation designs; models for causal analysis, and quality assessment of multi-method evaluations. More recently, she has started researching how systemic transformations can be analysed and evaluated.

As former Secretary General of the European Evaluation Society (EES) and scientific programme coordinator of the 12th EES biennial conference in 2016, Barbara is an active member of the global evaluation community and past or current member of the American, European, British, Swedish and Italian evaluation societies. She is also an editorial board member of the journal “Evaluation”.

Latest News

CECAN Conference 2024

CECAN Conference 2024

On 4th June 2024, CECAN hosted it’s 2024 Conference ‘Looking Back and Looking Forward: Closing the loop from evaluation to policy making’ at the prestigious Royal Academy Of Engineering.

CECAN Update (July 2023)

CECAN Update (July 2023)

Take a look at our latest CECAN update to find out more about what we’ve been working on and activities coming soon.

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