Becoming Big by Remaining Small: Atrapanieblas and the Politics of Scaling in Adaptation Technologies

Adaptation technologies have become central to climate policy, particularly in the Global South, where locally developed innovations are increasingly expected to address global environmental challenges. This article examines how such technologies become scalable through the history of atrapanieblas (fog catchers), first developed in Chile in the 1950s and later adopted worldwide as a model for harvesting water in arid regions. It argues that their international success depended less on technical ingenuity than on a politics of "scaling smallness" that presented them as flexible, inexpensive, and locally adaptable while making them globally mobile. Yet the collapse of the first full-scale fog-harvesting system reveals the limits of this strategy. Once deployed as public infrastructure, atrapanieblas required forms of governance, maintenance, and institutional capacity that could no longer remain "small." The history of atrapanieblas thus shows that scaling adaptation technologies requires scaling institutions and infrastructures as well as devices.