ABSTRACT
This chapter considers different landscapes found in two contrasting study areas, southern Honduras and coastal Oaxaca. Southern Honduras is in many respects typical of the highly disturbed ‘agroecosystem’ that dominates much of Central America, where the original tree cover has largely been lost and land tenure is largely individual in nature. The ‘promised lands’ include urban centres, the United States and, particularly for the population of southern Honduras, the humid zone agricultural frontier of the north coast. The institutional context in Honduras, related to the regulation and orientation of the interactions between the rural population and the natural resources of the dry forest, is characterized by limited technical and physical capacity and a high degree of centralization. Coastal Oaxaca, by contrast, contains large areas of mature and relatively undisturbed dry forest, and tenure is largely communal in nature. The chapter explores Mesoamerican Tropical Dry Forest and its constituent landscapes and land units, and the interactions between them, are highly complex.
