By Michael Blanding
When he takes students on his annual travel course, Doing Business in Brazil, Carlos Rufín presents them with a tale of two cities. In Rio de Janeiro, a city with 12 million people and significant poverty and social problems, the main energy company has struggled with leadership, seen huge financial losses, and watched while up to 40% of its electricity is stolen by residents who can’t afford to pay for it. Meanwhile in São Paulo, a city with a similar population, the main energy company has been profitable and successful, expanding affordable energy delivery to poorer areas of the city.
The difference, he shows students, is one of institutions.
“São Paulo is generally better governed than other states in Brazil—it has a more developed civil society,” says Rufín, a professor of strategy and international business. “The authorities in the state and city have said [to utilities], ‘You have to take care of this.’”
It’s a reminder, Rufín explains, of just how important it is for companies coming into another country to adapt their business model to the social reality of the place—but he doesn’t just tell students this, he shows them through interviews with utility executives and visits to local nonprofits in the backstreet favelas. They also travel to the rainforest to talk with Brazilian biologists and grapple with questions of profit, people, and sustainability.
Originally from Barcelona, Spain, Rufín has spent more than 30 years as a consultant and professor researching energy, poverty, and civil society around the world. Much of his work has focused on Latin America, contrasting strategies of different countries, states, and companies in delivering goods and services in a sustainable way.
In 2021, Rufín traveled to the Kyrgyz Republic as a Fulbright scholar to examine how to make energy production more sustainable. Central Asia, he says, is very susceptible to climate change.
“It’s basically a giant oasis dependent on snow in the mountains for water,” he says. At the same time, the republic relies on Soviet-era coal plants for energy, creating high levels of air pollution and negatively affecting the health of the population. “It’s a very good setting to ask how you can build renewable sources of energy in the context of deep poverty,” he reflects. In that and other research, Rufín is actively engaged with coming up with solutions to intractable problems around energy and poverty—and then bringing these examples home to Suffolk to inspire the next generation to do the same.
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Photograph by Michael J. Clarke
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Discovering common ground
