Construction and contestation of the palm-oil hegemony in Honduras: the land conflict in the Aguán region and the Aguán CDM project

The Aguán project, registered as a Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) project in 2011, aims to capture and utilize biogas generated at the Exportadora del Atlántico palm oil extraction mill owned by Dinant, one of the largest palm oil extractors in Honduras. It has been one of the most controversial CDM projects registered to date, mainly due to human rights violations that have taken place at and around the project site and the project owner’s alleged involvements in the context of a pre-existing and ongoing land conflict which has claimed over 150 lives in the Aguán region since 2009. Informed by primary and secondary data sources collected during field-research in Honduras, this thesis explores the impacts of the CDM project’s implementation on the region’s ongoing land conflict, by analysing power relationsaround and through palm oil production in the Aguán Valley and in Honduras prior and during the project’s implementation. In doing so, it draws upon and seeks to contribute to Agrarian Political Economy (APE) and Neo-Gramscian perspectives on social change particularly around the dynamics of dispossession, class formation and agrarian transformation in Honduras. This is done by analysing the emergence and development of the Honduran palm oil industry, as well as the land conflict in the region from a theoretical framework combining an APE approach with a neo-Gramscian perspective. It also provides an empirical grounding for claims that initiatives within global environmental governance are subordinated to the interests of hegemonic social forces. The analysis explores the role that the Aguán CDM project has played in reinforcing the project owner’s power in the Honduran palm oil hegemony within material, institutional/organisational and discursive spheres. Furthermore, thisthesis shows how the internationalcivil society campaign against the project’s registration has enabled the Aguán’s (landless) peasant movements to further advance their strategic situation in a war of position