“The project doesn’t exist!”: an ecology of non-projects in coastal Peru

In this article, I focus on how the members of a Peruvian NGO – specializing in the implementation of fog catchers – mobilized the notion of “the project” to pursue their goals. While the fog catchers were presented by the NGO workers as a water supply system for vulnerable populations on the urban periphery, they were often redirected by their beneficiaries as tools for informal urbanization. The fog catchers captured not only fog, but also property ownership and state infrastructure, among other things. Within this context, the NGO members created and sustained an ecology of “non-projects” – an ever-proliferating number of projects that seemed to exist but actually did not. By describing how my interlocutors went about doing this, the article argues that ethnographers should attend to how contemporary influence and ubiquity of the project form may reside not only in its role as an organizing force, but likewise in its aesthetics and status as a sign. From this perspective, a key aspect for the study of projects is people’s capacity to mimic their form, exploit their aesthetic appeal, and, in doing so, circumvent their structuring effects.