The Superintendency for the Development of the North-East (SUDENE) and the training of a generation of development planners in Brazil’s north-east

This article examines the training of development planners in north-eastern Brazil by the Superintendency for the Development of the North-East (SUDENE) in the 1960s and 1970s. Supported by the Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLA), SUDENE held courses on development and economic and social planning and trained generations of specialists with a view to tackling inequalities and underdevelopment in the region. It was one of the main channels for the dissemination of ECLA ideas in Brazil, acting as a producer of knowledge about the regional situation, a laboratory for institutional reforms to modernize the bureaucratic machinery and a standard-bearer for the ideology of national developmentalism. Institutional documents, press coverage and testimonials from former members of SUDENE are used to reconstruct the activities involved in training specialist staff and the processes that led to the constitution, expansion and disbanding of the SUDENE technical team.