Isabella Alcañiz is Assistant Professor and the Harrison Distinguished Professor in Environmental Politics at the Department of Government and Politics, University of Maryland, College Park. Professor Alcañiz grew up in South America and has carried out extensive field research in Latin America and Africa. She has taught at the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Houston, and universities in Argentina and Europe. Her research is published in World Politics, the British Journal of Political Science, the Latin American Research Review, Latin American Perspectives, and Environmental Science and Policy. She received her PhD in Political Science from Northwestern University, Illinois.

• 1. Why do bureaucrats cooperate? International inter-agency networks in the Global South; 2. Bureaucrats across borders; 3. Skill formation, economic crisis, and expert networks in the nuclear sectors of Argentina and Brazil; 4. International inter-agency cooperation in nuclear energy, science, and technology (NEST); 5. Explaining international inter-agency cooperation in nuclear energy, science, and technology (NEST); 6. International inter-agency cooperation in the protection of the global environment; 7. Explaining international inter-agency cooperation in the protection of the environment; 8. After austerity; 9. Conclusion: the hidden costs of low skills.

'Environmental and Nuclear Networks in the Global South: How Skills Shape International Cooperation is an indispensable book for furthering our understanding of technocratic bureaucracies and transnational policy networks. It provides important contributions to comparative political economy, while reshaping the study of environmental and NEST cooperation in the Global South. Moreover, its research design offers an excellent example of scholarly work based on mixed methods by combining the qualitative evidence gathered in numerous in-depth elite interviews with the quantitative results generated by complex social network analysis.' Maria Victoria Murillo, Columbia University, New York