PJHR Affiliate Dr. Annette LaRocco Completes Fulbright Grant in Botswana

Last April, I was awarded a Fulbright Grant through the Africa Regional Research Program and spent the Fall 2022 semester at the Okavango Research Institute in Maun, Botswana. While at ORI, I began initial research for my project “Mothers’ Nature?: What All-Female Conservation Initiatives Can Tell Us About Gender, the Environment, and Power.” All-female safari guiding teams and all-female anti-poaching units have become more common in the last decade. These programs, many of which have been rolled out in southern Africa, are often praised in media and by donor agencies as the next innovation in biodiversity conservation. They are said to achieve better conservation results than their all-male counterparts, while also empowering women and local communities. However, these lofty claims have not been studied in a rigorous, scholarly manner. My project is investigating this relatively new style of gendered conservation intervention through first-of-its-kind qualitative fieldwork.  

  While in Botswana, I was fortunate enough to be able to conduct interviews and participant observation with two all-female teams—an all-female safari guiding team based in the Chobe National Park, as well as a newly constituted all-female wildlife ranger team operating in the Okavango Delta. I was the first researcher to conduct fieldwork with these groups and now have lots of data to analyze! I’m looking forward to combing through interview transcripts and my field journals as I prepare for the next phase of my project. 

  This Fulbright program is a research-only grant that allows grantees to conduct fieldwork in two or more countries across the region of Sub-Saharan Africa. This unique opportunity is well suited to my multi-sited research project, so I’m very pleased to have this opportunity. I’m looking forward to continuing this project over summer 2023, when I’ll return to southern Africa. I’ll conduct the second part of my grant in Zimbabwe, affiliated with the Gender Institute at Midlands State University in Gweru, Zimbabwe. While in-country, I am planning on working with two additional all-female teams as I build out a cross-country assessment of the impacts and broader significance of these new initiatives.