Eve E. Buckley's study of drought and development in northeast Brazil offers fascinating new terrain for the history of modernity, regionalism and science – the latter as both ideology and political practice. Buckley explores government initiatives from 1904 to 1964 seeking to alleviate the problems of drought in the semi-arid sertão region, whose inhabitants (known as sertanejos) have traditionally stood as symbols of backwardness in the Brazilian national imaginary. The perceived backwardness of the sertão and its populations serves as a central theme of the book, as the author explores the shortcomings of development projects to ‘transform’ sertanejos into modern (and thus valid) members of the polity. That these attempts not only failed, but probably exacerbated poverty in the sertão, shows a form of technocratic hubris and the limitations of scientists as agents for social change.

The book traces four cohorts of Brazilian technocrats. This included public health workers in the first decades of the century, who set the precedent for framing scientific approaches to solve the nation's problems; civil engineers through the 1930s, who oversaw the building of dams and roads as a means to improve infrastructure without upending the social order; agronomists in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, who articulated the sertanejos’ vulnerability to drought as a problem of insufficient education and culture; and finally, development economists, who, in the middle decades of the century, sought to reorganise the region's economy with an emphasis on industrialisation and food security. Each of these cohorts is given its own chapter in the book, with a full chronicle of the respective government agencies and their technocrats.

By presenting a dual narrative of climate and structural inequality, Buckley makes two interwoven arguments. First, she contends that the history of sertanejo marginalisation is itself an environmental history. The periodic droughts in the sertão led to waves of retirantes (drought migrants) abandoning their hinterland farms and seeking refuge in cities, where the concentration of impoverished, starved – and ethnically mixed – people helped create and perpetuate notions of sertanejos as destitute and savage. For Buckley, one cannot understand the problems of drought in isolation from the social and economic realities initially catalysed by the droughts themselves. But for the technocrats in Buckley's book, the focus on climate as a singular and solvable issue ignored (whether by professional choice or political necessity) the underlying connections between drought and inequality.

This brings us to the book's second argument: the inherent boundaries of technocratic development precluded the initiatives from ever achieving their intended goals. On the one hand, this is evident in the way that projects had to be designed within the power dynamics of the sertão. Because any structural changes (such as land redistribution) were seen as a threat to the holdings of elite politicians and local landlords, much of the work, especially in the early decades of the twentieth century, involved building reservoirs and roads. On the surface, these projects brought the promise of modernisation, yet in reality they primarily benefited the elites who controlled the lands on which infrastructure was actually built. Buckley shows how this created a ‘drought industry’ that served only ‘to solidify existing social relations, reinforcing landowners’ control over natural resources and the human beings who depended on them and thus increasing landowners’ power as local patrons’ (p. 224). The paradox of how development projects intended to alleviate poverty actually made life more precarious for sertanejos, would, on its own, constitute an important and worthy scholarly intervention.

But Buckley also goes deeper to examine the work of the technocrats themselves, and argues that their professional and ideological approaches confined them to what Michael Ervin (‘The 1930 Agrarian Census in Mexico: Agronomists, Middle Politics, and the Negotiation of Data Collection’, Hispanic American Historical Review, 87: 3 (2007), pp. 537–70) has called the ‘middle politics’ of scientific management. Relying on extensive documentation from the federal and regional development agencies, the author presents the technocrats-cum-drought agents in a nearly impossible bind. They were tasked with designing projects that would end climate-related poverty, yet to do so without sparking any political conflict. The efforts of these drought agents were often met with resistance not only from their own superiors and local elites, but also from the sertanejos themselves, who did not always embrace the technocrats’ proposals for farming and resource management. Buckley argues that the recalcitrance of local communities fed into the technocrats’ own assumptions of sertanejos as ‘a race apart, prone to religious fanaticism, superstition, and barbaric violence. For elite members of a profession that prided itself on rationality in all things, such perceptions must have made lowly sertanejos seem very foreign’ (p. 84). The fact that technocrats shared in the broader stigmatisation of sertanejos also helps explain why they zealously clung to a belief in scientific management. This offers a poignant reflection on the professionalisation of scientific engineering: if technocrats were to acknowledge the larger structural factors that linked environmental crises and poverty, drought would then be defined in social, rather than technical terms. In such a scenario, engineers would have a smaller role in solving the problem. In the case of each of the book's four cohorts of technocrats, Buckley shows how they all framed the problem of drought in a way that only their particular profession could solve. In the end, technocratic solutions were unable to escape this feedback loop and the problems of drought in the sertão were, on the whole, as challenging in the 1960s as they had been at the beginning of the century.

Without criticising an historian for not including more material in their book, it is a bit surprising that the author ends her study in 1964, at precisely the moment when a self-identifying technocratic military regime seized power. Although the dictatorship's development efforts in the northeast differed in content and scope from what Buckley analyses in her book, the choice to conclude her main analysis in 1964 seems like a missed opportunity to reflect on the multiple meanings of technocracy in Brazil, where it came to represent not only development or scientific technocracy, but geopolitical technocracy and the exercise of national security. Despite these quibbles, Buckley's study is a welcome addition and a timely parable on questions of technocratic development and the environment.