Political Science

Dan ’63 and Betty Churchill Associate Professor in Climate Policy & International Affairs
PhD, Politics & International Studies, Trinity College, University of Cambridge
MSc, African Studies, St. Anne’s College, University of Oxford
BA, Political Science & English, Barnard College, Columbia University
Boudreau Hall
annette.larocco@maine.edu
(207) 581-1871

Annette A. LaRocco is the Dan ’63 and Betty Churchill Associate Professor in Climate Policy and International Affairs in the Department of Political Science and School of Policy and International Affairs at the University of Maine. Her research interests are in postcolonial state-building, gender and environment, the geopolitics of biodiversity conservation, climate, and land-use, and environmental governance processes in the Global South. Currently, she is working on her second book project interrogating gender-prioritized environmental policy interventions in southern Africa.

Professor LaRocco has published her work in academic journals such as Politics and Gender, Journal of Southern African Studies, Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, and others, including in several specialist edited volumes. Her first book, The Nature of Politics: State Building and the Conservation Estate in Postcolonial Botswana was published in Ohio University Press’s Research in International Studies, Africa Series in 2024. The Nature of Politics explores the far-reaching political and social impacts of environmental policymaking in contemporary Botswana.

Before coming to Maine, she was an Associate Professor of Political Science at Florida Atlantic University. She is the recipient of a 2022-2023 Africa Regional Research Program Fulbright grant. While a U.S. Fulbright Scholar, LaRocco was a visiting researcher at the Okavango Research Institute in Maun, Botswana and at the Gender Institute at Midlands State University in Gweru, Zimbabwe.

Curriculum Vitae