Abstract
We develop an arbitrary-order primal method for diffusion problems on general polyhedral meshes. The degrees of freedom are scalar-valued polynomials of the same order at mesh elements and faces. The cornerstone of the method is a local (element-wise) discrete gradient reconstruction operator. The design of the method additionally hinges on a least-squares penalty term on faces weakly enforcing the matching between local element- and face-based degrees of freedom. The scheme is proved to optimally converge in the energy norm and in the $L^2$-norm of the potential for smooth solutions. In the lowest-order case, equivalence with the Hybrid Finite Volume method is shown. The theoretical results are confirmed by numerical experiments up to order 4 on several polygonal meshes.