Mayra Alejandra Flores Muñoz

This research explores the political and material life of fog in the Ecuadorian páramo, a high-altitude wetland critical to water provisioning in the Andes. Amid prolonged droughts, glacier loss, and mining expansion, fog emerges as a scientific object of study, a future water source, and a political force within an endangered ecology. However, elusive and ethereal, fog challenges conventional understandings of infrastructure and technologies aimed at managing and studying waterscapes. While hydrologists aim to estimate fog’s contributions to the páramo’s water cycle, beyond its role as a water source, local cosmologies engage with fog otherwise: as an agent capable of resisting extractive intrusion. Drawing on ethnographic research at two key sites, an ecohydrological observatory and a community-led fog-harvesting project, this study examines how diverse actors (scientists, campesinos, public servants, and NGOs) interact with fogginess. This project asks: How does fog become a matter of concern in contemporary water politics and practices in times of drought? What meanings and experiences of fog exist alongside hydrological research? How does fog emerge as an anti-extractive agent amid climate emergency? By focusing on fog’s material and political entanglements, this research contributes to debates on water’s agency, environmental infrastructure, and more-than-human politics in the Andes.