The conference took place in Bucharest, Romania on 20-21 June, with DG EMPL participating in two workshops.

The conference focused on how the EU cohesion policy can help make EU-wide investments more results-oriented, to the benefit of European citizens. Stakeholders were invited to reflect on the role and exchange views on the contribution of the policy to promoting performance-oriented public investments and to developing a culture of evaluation in Member States.

Participants included policy makers, national, regional and local authorities, managing authorities, evaluation experts, academics, civil society and other stakeholders. Staff from the Directorate-General for Employment, Social Affairs and Inclusion participated in workshops 7 and 8.

Workshop 7: Exploiting the European Structural and Investment Funds (ESIF) open data

Workshop 7 was a presentation on the ESIF Open Data platform, which aggregates data from the ESIF programme. The workshop took participants behind the web interface with its standard visualisations into the key 2014-2020 open data sets that drive the platform. It also explored the data catalogue and showed participants how to become a “power user” in the platform.

Workshop 8: From administrative registers to impacts of the European Social Fund (ESF) operations

In workshop 8, participants discussed the potential of increased availability of data from public administrations for evaluation. The workshop included discussions on issues surrounding the use of micro data, such as data protection. Participants also learned about the Belgian experience in linking different administrative registers and making these datasets available to researchers.