Rodrigo Tavares (Lisbon) is the Founder and CEO of the Granito Group, a company that advances the sustainable economy through strategy consulting, financial advisory, and policy & research. The Group has collaborated with multiple financial organizations (institutional investors, asset managers, family offices, regulators) in Europe, Latin America, the Middle East, and North America to enable their transition to a sustainable economy.
He is also an Adjunct Professor (Professor Catedrático Convidado) at NOVA School of Business and Economics (Nova SBE) in Portugal, where he teaches postgraduate and executive courses and conducts research on finance and sustainability issues.
He holds over 15 years of experience in government and international organizations working with foreign affairs and economic cooperation. In 2008-2010 he was invited by the UN Secretariat to write Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s annual reports on Africa’s development. From 2011 to 2014 he served as Head of São Paulo State Government’s Office of Foreign Affairs.
His academic path includes the universities of Harvard (Senior Research Fellow), Columbia (Research Fellow on a postdoc grant), Gothenburg (Ph.D.), and California, Berkeley (Visiting Research Fellow). He was also an Adjunct Professor at Getúlio Vargas Foundation (FGV) in Brazil (2013-2018) where he was awarded a teaching prize in 2017 for ranking the highest in students’ evaluations. Rodrigo is the author of 4 books on international relations and economic development (published by Oxford University Press, Routledge, and Lynne Rienner), and multiple book chapters and peer-reviewed articles. The latest articles are focused on ESG issues and were published in the Journal of Sustainable Finance & Investment and the Journal of Environmental Investing. He has taken executive courses at Harvard University on negotiation (2006) and on global leadership (2021); and at Princeton University on energy transition (2022).
He was nominated Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum (2017) for his work on sustainable finance; selected as StartUp Portugal Ambassador (2018); and nominated Young Leader by the Government of Quebec in Canada (2011).
He is an op-ed columnist for Folha de S.Paulo (Brazil) and Expresso (Portugal) on the topics of finance, economics, and sustainability. He also writes regularly for the World Economic Forum’s website and for Quartz on these issues.
Rodrigo Tavares is a Certified ESG Analyst® (CESGA) from the European Federation of Financial Analysts Societies (EFFAS) and holds a Certificate in ESG Investing from the CFA Institute.
