Field of specialisation

EU law and institutions; Multilevel governance and decentralisation in Europe; European Public Procurement Law and Practice.

Professional experience

Gracia Vara Arribas (ES) is a lawyer, working as an expert project leader and consultant at the European Institute of Public Administration (EIPA). Her fields of specialisation cover multilevel governance, better regulation (subsidiarity and EU added value) and the evaluation of public policies and projects, with a special focus on strategic public procurement law and practice. She works as a consultant for the European institutions (Commission, Committee of the Regions, the European Parliament, the European Court of Auditors) and regional and local governments.

Under her leadership, several impact assessments and evaluation studies have been carried out on EU laws at a regional level as commissioned by the EU Presidencies (UK 2006 and SE 2009) and for different Member States (SE, UK, FR, NL, DE) and NO. In 2009, she was commissioned by the Dutch Ministry of the Interior and Kingdom Relations to evaluate the impact of the Lisbon Treaty on the Dutch Provinces and Municipalities. In 2013, the European Committee of the Regions contracted her to draft a report on the role of regional parliaments in the process of subsidiarity analysis, and in 2016 the European Parliament asked her to write the report on ‘The Cost of Non-Europe in the Sharing Economy’. In 2017, she helped the Barcelona City Council to produce the guide to Public Procurement for Innovation and also supported the launch of the Innovation Lab in the city. Drawing on her years of work at EIPA and real-life cases of consultancy projects, she has subsequently produced several publications in these fields and delivered training courses for the European institutions and central and city  governments.