In Conversation: Understanding Biodiversity as a Political Project

Dr. Michael Horswell engages in conversation with Dr. Annette LaRocco,  an associate professor in FAU’s Department of Political Science. In this upcoming episode, Dr. LaRocco discusses several topics, including conservation politics, how studying abroad helped shape her career,  and her new book, The Nature of Politics: State Building and the Conservation Estate in Postcolonial Botswana.

Why do states choose to set aside land for national parks and other protected areas? How do these decisions impact their citizens and structure their economies? How and why do states decide to make governing their environments a political priority? These are questions explored by Annette LaRocco in her book The Nature of Politics: State Building and the Conservation Estate in Postcolonial Botswana. Drawing on hundreds of interviews and years of extensive fieldwork in Botswana, LaRocco argues that the seemingly mundane processes of conserving landscapes and wildlife are, in fact, deeply political acts that are essential to state-building for many countries in the postcolonial Global South. Conservation itself is political and impacts human populations and societies, irrespective of its ecological or biological impacts. In her new book, she explores how conservation is a way that states exert their authority over people, places, and resources and how it structures economic relationships at local, national, and global levels. 

 Dr. LaRocco,  Ph.D.,  teaches classes in African politics, environmental politics, the politics of global development, and international relations at Florida Atlantic University's Department of Political Science. . Her research interests include the study of political implications of biodiversity conservation and other environmental policies, specifically in regions of the postcolonial Global South. She has conducted fieldwork in southern Africa for over a decade, most recently as a U.S. Fulbright Scholar in Botswana and Zimbabwe.