Ecology of capture: Creating land titles out of thin air in coastal Peru

In coastal Peru, fog has recently been re-apprehended as an alternative water source for residents on the urban periphery. This article describes how a local NGO’s fog capture project repurposed its multi-national big tech funder into an engine of informal urbanisation. I demonstrate how by instigating a process of multi-directional capture between NGO, funder, government, and recipients, the NGO’s fog catchers mediated their beneficiaries’ hopes about the acquirement of land titles, thereby drawing the state in as a potential supplier of the very infrastructure to which fog capture was being presented as an alternative. Against this backdrop, I propose an approach to micro-infrastructures as political materials with the capacity to reconfigure sociopolitical realities.