Places
Portugal
Portugal is the country I will always call home. I was not born here, but this is where I grew up, where I became an adult and where most of what little remains of my immediate family lives. Even now, I am in Lisbon every week.
Portugal has scientific talent and entrepreneurial energy, world-class research and infrastructure, and a universal health system that, notwithstanding my own rather unflattering opinion of it, delivers outcomes that compare strongly across many international indicators. That said, Portugal repeatedly struggles to connect research, technology transfer, scale-up support and industrial strategy. I hope soon to share news here about something I am building to make a difference.
The missing vision
Portugal has plans and programmes, but no durable, widely shared account of the country it wants to become.
To my dismay, and immense disappointment in the country I call home, Portugal has never produced a durable, widely shared account of the country it wants to become. We have strategies, programmes and plans, but not a national vision capable of surviving electoral cycles and organising ambition across institutions. The closest contemporary substitute, Portugal 2030, is principally a framework for determining how European structural funds will be deployed, following decades in which those funds have poured into the country. The absence of the document is itself part of the problem. This also explains why I have written comparatively little about Portugal recently: I generally prefer to write positive rather than critical pieces. Below are several essays I have written that trace this long-running translation problem.
Writing connected to Portugal
The complete archive of writing connected to this place.