Oil palm dispersal into protected wetlands: Human–environment dichotomies and the limits to governance in southern Mexico

•Oil palm is spreading into protected wetlands of coastal Chiapas (Mexico).•This case might reflect a larger environmental problem linked with oil palm in Latin America.•Narratives driving palm oil governance oversimplify nature-society relations with adverse political and ecological effects.•This political ecology study shows that power is a more-than-human affair.•The epistemologies underlying palm oil governance need to be questioned. New governance strategies, mostly based on certification, emerged as a response to the severe environmental impacts oil palm has had across the globe. Following a political ecology approach, this article argues that dominant understandings of nature–society relations informing palm oil governance limit efforts to prevent and mitigate such impacts. This study analyses oil palm dispersal into protected coastal wetlands in Chiapas (Mexico), the governance strategies it triggered and its causes. Based on ethnographic methods, complemented with archival work and land use and cover change analysis, this article examines the environmental narratives underlying governance efforts and the material entanglements leading to oil palm dispersal from a more-than-human perspective. Dominant environmental narratives, which relied on popular dichotomous conceptions of human–environment relations, blamed smallholders while overlooking the role played by corporations, the state, and oil palm itself. Such narratives have not only political (the disempowerment of smallholders) but also ecological consequences (oil palm dispersal into water chestnut and mangrove forests continues). This article highlights the need to question the knowledge frames driving palm oil governance, to consider the power-laden character of specific forms of knowing and telling environmental change, and to conceive oil palm as necessarily entangled in a complex web of socio-ecological relations.