Biography

Gaby Umbach is Part-time Professor, Director of GlobalStat and H2020 TRIGGER consortium member leading the TRIGGER research pillar on global governance and EU actorness. She is also non-resident Visiting Fellow of the European Parliament (European Parliamentary Research Service); Adjunct Professor at the Universities of Cologne and Innsbruck; Board member of the Institute for European Politics Berlin; Book Review Editor of the Journal of Common Market Studies; and Editorial Board member of the International Journal Evaluation and Program Planning.

She holds a PhD in Political Science from Cologne University, where she was Senior Research Associate of the Jean Monnet Chair for Political Science and the Seminar for Social Policy from 2000 to 2014. In 2009, she received the Stiftung Demokratie Best PhD Thesis Award for outstanding research on democratic decision-making within the EU’s supranational polity. Prior to joining the EUI in 2010, she conducted research on EU integration studies; Europeanisation; multilevel and new modes of governance; policy co-ordination; environmental, employment and socio-economic policies; economic governance and cohesion policy; EU constitutionalisation; EU enlargement; and curriculum development in EU studies. Since 2010, she works on evidence-based policy-making (EBPM), measuring as governance technique, global governance, sustainable development and data science. Among her most publications is the `Palgrave Handbook on Indicators in Global Governance’ (co-edited with D.V. Malito and N. Bhuta; 2018).

At the EUI, she designed and implemented GlobalStat, a multisource-`beyond GDP’ database on developments in a globalised world, of which she is the Founding Director and for which she institutionalised contacts with the European Parliamentary Research Service (EPRS) and OECD to link GlobalStat directly to politics. She also co-directed research projects on measurement as a governance technique to inform EBPM (“Global Governance by Indicators” and “On the Political Economy of Measuring State Capacity and Governance”). She enhanced her expertise through her one-year practice as member of the EUI’s Ethics Committee (2015-16) and her work as policy analyst at the EPRS where she was responsible for research methodologies and strategic liaison to academia (2017-18). In the latter position, she responded to the practical demand for EBPM in EU politics and developed institutional strategies to meet this demand, including for training approaches for policy analysts and staff.

Over the past 19 years, a multitude of international collaborations enabled her to establish a wide cooperation network within academia and EU politics across and beyond the EU, which made her particularly interested in aspects of global governance, multilevel policy design, policy innovation and intercultural learning.

Fields of expertise

• Knowledge Governance and Transformations