(Meta-)Participation and Politics of Indigeneity: Indigenous engagements with the EU-Honduras Voluntary Partnership Agreement

This paper analyses participation by indigenous organisations with the Forest Law Enforcement, Governance and Trade (FLEGT) Voluntary Partnership Agreement (VPA) between the European Union and Honduras. The FLEGT VPA agreement is aimed at the governing of bilateral timber supply chains between the EU and Honduras through legality verification and licensing of timber products. In addition, it contains elements aimed at ‘improving forest governance’ by increasing transparency and rule of law in the forest sector. Different to other EU trade agreements, non-state actor participation in the VPA takes place in the negotiation as well as implementation phase. In the EU-Honduras VPA, participation by indigenous actors has been considerable but not without contention: while several indigenous groups have worked with the VPA in an attempt to advance indigenous rights, others have contested it as a neoliberal and neocolonial project that further marginalises indigenous communities. Different types of meta-participation therefore occurred, ranging from attempts to put indigenous needs on the VPA agenda to resistance against the VPA policy project altogether. This paper analyses these various forms of meta-participation from an interpretative perspective. It asks how different indigenous actors interpret VPA participation and its relation to the struggle for indigenous rights. In doing so, it attempts to go beyond the perception of VPA participation as a policy goal in itself and understand its position within wider struggles over natural resources, cultural recognition, and territorial autonomy.