Applying this framework of socio-hydrological relations to contexts suffering from water shortages reveals the extent to which multiple social and ecological factors produce this scarcity, impacting agriculture, health, the environment, and the economy (Liu et al., 2017). Approximately 2.2 billion people worldwide lack access to safely managed drinking water services. An estimated 8 billion people experience severe water scarcity for at least part of the year due to climatic and non-climatic factors. Almost half a billion people live in low-water areas, where the long-term average rainfall is only as high as 1 year out of six (Caretta and Mukherji, 2022). The consequences of the observed changes in the hydrological cycle on people and ecosystems are increasingly evident, and many of these impacts are negative and disproportionately felt by already vulnerable communities.

While “water scarcity” is a common term, it has different meanings in various contexts. For this paper, the crucial differentiation is between physical water scarcity, such as in the desert, and “use scarcity,” understood as a problem of access and management (Molden, 2019). As Baer (2014) points out, scarcity is a highly political dimension in Latin America–as in other countries where third-party development projects intervene. In Latin America, these two dimensions of water scarcity are deeply intertwined, giving space for several phenomena of extreme drought. In other words, the causes of drought are, on the one hand, climate change (increased temperatures and variability in rainfall), deforestation (the removal of forests and prolonged agriculture reduce soil capacity to retain water), unsustainable water use (excessive withdrawals from rivers, lakes, and aquifers for agricultural irrigation, industry, and domestic use), decreasing rainfall, and the drying up of local aquifers (Liu et al., 2017).

On the other hand, as Molden (2019) reminds us, the root cause of scarcity is how water is managed: “There is no scarcity of water, only a scarcity of management” (Molden, 2019, 258). In other words, scarcity arises from the management system, where access to water and distribution reveal social segmentation and relations of inequality (Van Aken, 2012; Blanco et al., 2023). Therefore, poor management creates a mechanism of scarcity production, often supported by environmental rhetoric that obscures the social, political, and management dimensions generating it.

Political and managerial reasons do not deny that water scarcity is also an environmental issue caused by changing climatic conditions. However, it entails an additional level of complexity that does not settle for politically neutral ecological reasons. In this context, the hydrosocial framework unveils the biological, historical, political and cultural interconnections related to water scarcity, management and practices. Moreover, this framework highlights how water rights, principles, and authorities coexist and interact in the same arena and how hydrological knowledge is produced and used in policy (Budds, 2013).

Chile is facing one of the worst droughts in its recent history, with some regions experiencing significant reductions in rainfall since 2010 (Garreaud et al., 2019). As elsewhere, climate change is altering precipitation patterns, leading to prolonged periods of drought. The El Niño period also contributes to this, leading to drier-than-normal conditions. In addition, inadequate management of water resources, including intensive use for agriculture and mining, has also contributed. The impacts of drought have already damaged agriculture and crops, provoked drinking water shortages, increased desertification and soil degradation, generated stress on ecosystems and loss of biodiversity, and stress on communities and social systems (Errázuriz, 2014).

During the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship, Chile introduced the Water Code (Código de Aguas), one of the most radical reforms in water management. The government selected a series of civilians as consultants, including a group of economists known as the Chicago Boys, who had studied economics at the University of Chicago under the guidance of Milton Friedman, one of the leading exponents of neoliberal thought. Upon returning, they assumed government positions in Chile, promoting widespread deregulation, market liberalisation, privatisation, and State retrenchment in areas such as water systems, electricity, and healthcare.

In particular, the 1981 Water Code focused on privatising water rights, allowing them to be bought and sold on the open market (Bauer, 1998). Water rights were separated from land ownership and granted indefinitely (Errázuriz, 2014) and for free, facilitating ownership to individuals and companies. This reform aimed to promote efficiency and optimal allocation of water resources through market mechanisms. In markets, prices facilitate the measurement and comparison of different goods by coordinating dispersed information about supply and demand. These are some significant advantages of market mechanisms over central state planning (Bauer, 1998). In this way, water rights became tradable assets, creating what Robbins (2012) defined as a model of “apolitical ecology.” The idea was that water distribution would be managed through the free market to ensure neutrality concerning political influences. However, this approach has turned water into a field of conflict: available to all who can afford it but hardly accessible to the most disadvantaged social strata. In the context of increasing water scarcity, the economic value of water is raised and made the centre of political and environmental conflicts (Bauer, 1998; Larrain and Schaeffer, 2010).

Budds highlights that neoliberal thinking and the perception of water as “the stuff” (Illich, 1985) lead to a technocratic approach to political management, where technical experts develop and direct policies. The techno-scientific attitude emerges as a driving force behind bureaucracy, serving as a crucial tool for control and administration. It creates a readable and mappable reality, cleaning off the confusion of the natural world (Budds, 2013). The market’s use for claiming resources, access, and territorial transformation has radicalised economic models of domination instead of serving as an emancipatory instrument. Consequently, it has increased unequal access to water and amplified user conflicts and negative environmental impacts. However, technocracy is continually challenged by local practices enacted by social actors to generate alternative, localised, relational, and experience-based knowledge spaces instead of relying solely on techno-scientific notions.

In conclusion, the Water Code of 1981 delegated administrative authority regarding water resources from the State to transnational private corporations. Water was dematerialised and abstracted from social and physical contexts to be transformed into an invisible, tradeable and regulatable commodity. The rural population has experienced, and continues to experience, the most significant repercussions of this water system. In this regard, while water is acknowledged as an inalienable human right and a public resource in the rest of the world (which does not guarantee uniform access for all population segments), in Chile, it is a mere commercial good circulating in the market. According to Santoro et al., this fact constitutes an “assault on life and human rights” (Santoro et al., 2018, 172, my translation).

This work is based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted by the author in Peña Blanca, a pueblo in northern Chile. The ethnography aimed to investigate the social implications of drought and fog catchers on the community. Peña Blanca is an Agricultural Community of 85 owners (called comuneros). Agricultural Communities are legal forms of unique ownership in Chile, governed by Law No. 19.233 of Decree No. 2 of 1968, which allows for joint ownership of land, i.e., property shared between several people. Legally, the owner of the land in the geographical area of Peña Blanca is the entire community. The number of comuneros was decided in 1978 when the community was formally established, and it cannot be increased or decreased. A comunero does not own the land itself, but the right of ownership (titulo de propiedad), which is the right to be a comunero. Each family may choose only one comunero as a legal representative within the group unless more property rights are acquired on different lands. A comunero can sell his property right to others – of the community or external. However, he cannot sell fragmented pieces of his land; he only sells the right to become a comunero and inherit a specific area of land. Such a norm allows the community to keep the number of comuneros stable and forbids fragmenting one’s land to sell different parts to different people. Thus, by selling one’s right to be a comunero, one loses the material good that corresponds to the land owned and the social right to be an official part of the community. In this sense, selling the right to be a comunero means losing part of one’s identity.

Therefore, even if the land in Peña Blanca is common property, each comunero has the right to own a plot where their house (or more houses, depending on the number of family members) and domestic gardens are typically built. In addition to this, each comunero rents multiple plots from the community to cultivate grain, animal pasture, or other plants. These rented areas are called lluvias. Today, the lluvias are mainly transit land since, after the drought, it has been impossible to cultivate them extensively. Consequently, most lluvias today are unrecognisable from individual or shared lands because they are neither fenced nor used. Indeed, the fact that they are called lluvias (literally “rain”) brings to light the deep dependence of this valley on rainwater, which is used as the primary irrigation method for cultivation.

Finally, the remaining lands are the common lands that, before the 2000s and the mega-drought, were used mainly for the collective cultivation of wheat and grazing cattle (Errázuriz, 2014). These collective practices were also profoundly intertwined with the community’s social and cultural life ² . Thus, when the soil gradually dried out, it also radically changed the community’s life. In 20 years, within a single generation, the common lands became uncultivated, the soil dried, and the process of desertification expanded. This phenomenon today is locally referred to as the mega-sequía – the mega-drought. The area of Peña Blanca has always been affected by cyclical droughts; every two or 3 years, the so-called good and bad years alternate. Rainfall tended to be inconsistent, typically concentrated in the winter months, but there were entire seasons with very little or no rain (Alexander, 2006).

Nevertheless, the community was used to it: they had systems for collecting rainwater and usually moved with the animals towards greener areas during bad years. Indeed, the documentation showcases varying productive strategies and cultural practices shaped by the community structure amid significant differences in the availability of environmental, human, and capital resources. The difference between these drought cycles and the mega-drought is that the latter refers to a continuous and drastic decrease in the pluviometry measured over the last 20 years. In addition, due to the scarcity of rainfall and centuries of extensive use, the soil is becoming less fertile, and desertification is progressing (Errázuriz, 2014).

The gradual decrease in rainfall led to the loss of surface water and negatively impacted soil fertility. This water scarcity had several economic and cultural impacts on the community. The first to disappear was the widespread cultivation of wheat and the extensive use of the lluvias. Subsequently, raising livestock, particularly horses and cows, became uncommon. For instance, some farmers had thousands of grazing animals before the mega-drought, whereas today, they have hundreds, if not fewer. Despite the significant water scarcity and arid soils in Peña Blanca, there is still access to potable water.

Nevertheless, faced with economic pressure, many young people have migrated to urban areas in search of employment and a better quality of life. These aspects are essential for understanding the community’s present situation. It is well-known that agricultural communities in Chile are economically and politically marginalised territories (Errázuriz, 2014). Despite these precarious conditions, the community received no support from national politics.

In 2005, the then president of the Peña Blanca community, together with Nicholas Errázuriz, founder of the FUAD (Fundación un Alto en el Desierto), a local NGO, developed an innovative project to counteract the forces of desertification and land degradation. They aimed to implement an adaptive strategy by recovering a portion of water from the frequent coastal fog (also called Camanchaca) that was highly present in the area. For this purpose, they developed a project called Atrapanieblas Comuneros. Atrapanieblas (or fog catchers) are simple structures with horizontal polypropylene nets (the most common is the Rachel 35%) perpendicular to the ground, supported by two lateral poles and in alignment with the prevailing wind direction. These nets ‘trap’ the fog that flows through their meshes. The fog, then, condenses and, due to gravity, slips down the net’s threads, ultimately collecting in barrels of various sizes via a piping system (Castelli et al., 2023). Over 15 years, through trial and error, the comuneros and FUAD managed to configure the infrastructure to its current state. When there is a significant amount of fog and wind, the water flow through the pipes is impressive, creating streams and eddies that flow at great speed, collecting in a 60,000 L pool. As of 2021, Peña Blanca had 28 meshes used for irrigation and animals’ drinking. The water collected in a year was around 571,590 L (meaning 2,190 L/m² and 60 L/m²/day).

The project’s name was thought to represent the idea of a bottom-up project conceived, made and maintained in collaboration with the comuneros of Peña Blanca. Peña Blanca is situated between Chile’s coast and the Andes, in a territory characterised by hills. At the beginning of the project, they noticed that the area with the highest and most constant presence of fog was the tallest hill (650 m), called the Cerro Grande. The atrapanieblas were built there. As we have seen, the land is mostly collectively owned, which means that even the project of the Atrapanieblas Comuneros had to go through the assembly and the comuneros, voted by the majority. Those who accepted the project won by very few votes, reflecting a deeply divided reality within the community and bringing different interests to light. The Cerro Grande was then turned into an ecological reserve, a protected area enclosed by a fence to keep the grazing animals out. The collected fog water was used mainly for reforesting the protected area and, in part, to fill a tank outside the area so that animals could drink water.

In conclusion, it is worth mentioning that the atrapanieblas serve as affordable and sustainable infrastructure. Some of the families of Peña Blanca have played a crucial role in constructing and maintaining these structures since the beginning. Moreover, in the project’s first stage, they self-organised to gather scientific data on fog and wind conditions, including type, velocity, and frequency, by constantly visiting the Cerro Grande (Di Tullio, 2023). Recently, thanks to the ongoing collaboration with the FUAD and the interest of the Ovalle municipality, they instituted a paid position in the community that takes care of the ecological reserve and its atrapanieblas.

The paper is based on the analysis of the Peña Blanca Water Corpus (PBWC) – a corpus ³ of interviews carried out among the Peña Blanca Community by Author. The corpus is constituted of 19 interviews carried out in a period of 2 months between November 2021 and January 2022. There were 23 interlocutors interviewed, and the interviews took place in their own houses. The interlocutors were chosen based on age, gender, location of their home, social strata, and profession to obtain a wide range of data. Moreover, as most of the population uses a dialect specific to the area, the Author conducted the interviews together with a member of the community - typically referred to as the primary or key informant in classic anthropological works (Weingrod, 2004). The corpus analysed in this paper was part of a broader ethnographic research to identify the connection between water scarcity, climate change and the social consequences in the Peña Blanca community. During the ethnographic fieldwork, two main strategies for qualitative analysis were used: participant observation and unstructured (or in-depth) interviews. However, given the multidisciplinary nature of this paper, which gives space to linguistic analysis, we will focus mainly on the interviews as primary data. For the interviews, the questions were related to three specific issues regarding water scarcity and the link with political and hydrological causes, the Atrapanieblas Comuneros project, and the changes in the community life caused by the drought. The interviews were manually transcripted verbatim. Table 1. summarises the corpus structure.

The paper will address how hydrosocial relations are discursively framed in the corpus, drawing on a multidisciplinary framework grounded on critical corpus-assisted discourse studies and anthropology.

Critical discourse studies is a problem-oriented approach that sees language as a social practice that is conditioned and, in turn, influences social structures carrying fundamental ideological underpinnings (Wodak and Meyer, 2015). Ideology, power, and context are the bedrock of such an approach and allow for a situated investigation of how language reproduces or challenges power structures.

Ethnographic practice is conventionally understood as a central component of anthropological inquiry (McGranahan, 2018) ⁴ , mainly defined by long-term participant observation. Participant observation is an inductive, open-ended method for studying what is significant to the community regarding specific issues. In this sense, ethnographic practice requires in-situ observation to describe the practices, discourses, and relationships surrounding specific issues (Ingold, 2008). The ethnographer interacts with the people involved and critically reflects on how her position is part of and influences the relationships established in the field (Elie, 2006).

One of the methods used by ethnographers is the interviews, which can be structured, semi-structured or unstructured. For this paper, we draw mainly on unstructured interview analysis to allow for linguistic analysis of the issue of interest. Unstructured interviews are used to guide the interlocutors’ responses and reactions as little as possible. The aim is to determine what is significant to the community and what they notice as crucial in the research context (Burgess, 1993). In this sense, even if the topic is suggested, the interview has open-ended questions on themes, and it is conducted more as a conversation, letting unexpected interconnections emerge. A particular form of unstructured interview used in the context of this research by the Author is the so-called life stories. This form of interview allows us to understand how some people perceive, react to and contribute to changes that affect and influence their lives as individuals and as members of a group or broader community. Therefore, practices, relations, narratives, and personal biographies are all significant data sources for ethnographic research (Krauß and Bremer, 2020).

Critical discursive approaches to ethnographic research and interviews are not new. Notably, the Discourse-ethnographic approach (DEA) developed by Krzyzanowski (2017) systematised a way to actually include the context of discourse into textual analysis of linguistic patterns along with critique and analysis of power relations. The DEA considers ethnography as a complex and dynamic research process which informs the analytical process throughout all its phases (Krzyzanowski, 2017). At the same time, the growing centrality of corpus linguistics within discourse studies (Machin and Mayr, 2012; Baker, 2023) brought scholars to investigate corpora of interviews with corpus linguistics methodologies (see Curry and Pérez-Paredes, 2023 inter alia). For this paper, we draw in particular on corpus-assisted discourse studies, namely, “that set of studies into the form and/or function of language as communicative discourse which incorporates the use of computerised corpora in their analyses” (Partington et al., 2013, 10). This approach that combines computational, quantitative methods with qualitative observation allows searching for “non-obvious meanings” (Partington et al., 2013, 11) and, at times, leads to serendipitous discoveries in discursive patterns.

Although Critical Discourse Studies and Anthropological research are different in scope and methodology, they share an interest in naturally occurring language, its cultural connotation, and situated nature. Thus, a synergy between the two is not only possible but also necessary. For this reason, the paper will integrate quantitative corpus-assisted methods with ethnographic fieldwork observations to address how hydro-social relations are discursively framed in the aforementioned interviews.

Framing can be considered an analytical paradigm that allows analysing how speakers select certain aspects of reality by means of salience and omissions to express identity or induce certain interpretations of facts and events (Entman, 1993). According to Entman’s framework, frames serve the purpose of defining problems, provide causal interpretations, produce moral judgment and recommend solutions for the problem which is discussed. Despite being mostly known for its deployment in media and communication studies for news analysis, this approach can allow us to analyse and discuss how social actors in Peña Blanca discuss the water problem against Chilean historical, cultural and social background.

To this aim, we started with a keyword analysis of the corpus. Keyword analysis is a corpus linguistics technique to investigate the saliency of words in a corpus named target against a generally more extensive corpus named reference corpus (see Baker, 2023 for more details). For our analysis, we compared our corpus against the Chilean domain of EsTenTen 2018, a corpus of web texts in Spanish Language from 2018.

The keywords were first computed using the Corpus Linguistics analysis software Sketch Engine (Kilgarriff et al., 2014) and then further computed in Excel to elicit keywords that were significant, highly frequent and above average in terms of difference against the reference corpus. More specifically, using loglikelihood (alpha = 0.0001), adjusted with the Bonferroni correction method, we downsized the number of keywords to only those significant, and then we computed the average relative frequency to select only those above this average frequency. Lastly, the average of the %DIFF (Gabrielatos, 2018) was computed to keep only keywords above it. This resulted in n = 35 significant, highly frequent and highly specific keywords. Table 2. shows the keyword lists.

In order to organise the keywords and proceed with the analysis, we inductively coded the keywords thematically as shown in Table 3. For the scope and purpose of this paper we will focus only on the analysis of the keywords under the water theme.

When addressing the issue of water availability, the first data that emerges is the space-temporal dimension of water presence and scarcity. In most interviews emerges a neat division between a “before” and an “after” of the drought that consequently shaped new economies and geographies within the Peña Blanca community. It presents a narrative of the past where water presence was abundant, as well as community solidarity and ties were strong–especially regarding the collective practice of wheat agriculture and farming–as opposed to a present of scarcity and drought.

The following excerpt from an interview with the president of Peña Blanca represents a diffuse perception of this neat temporal division.

1. […] what happened is that the year 2000 was the last time wheat was planted. That year when wheat planting ended was like a fatality. The wheat activity could not even be finished because it died everywhere. I mean, it stopped raining [thus, suddenly] the land was drier because it had been producing wheat for 500 years since the Spanish colonisers, and there were new commercial treaties, especially with Argentina; and Argentina is an agricultural power, so not only could wheat not be planted here because there was no water and because the land was becoming more and more eroded, but also because there was simply no money. So, that year, people sold all the wheat, and they lost money […]

The excerpt underscores a significant decline in water availability since 2000, which resonates with the literature’s emphasis on the detrimental impacts of water scarcity. It shows a strict interrelation between the end of extensive wheat cultivation, history, soil exploitation, the international economy, and water scarcity. Accordingly, research highlights the crucial role of water availability in agricultural productivity and ecosystem health, showing how long-term water scarcity can lead to land degradation, reduced agricultural yields, and altered landscapes (Caretta and Mukherji, 2022).

Historical data indicating abundant water resources supporting centuries of wheat cultivation contrasts sharply with current conditions, where reduced rainfall has led to barren landscapes and diminished agricultural output. This aligns with findings that water scarcity can transform previously fertile regions into less productive areas (Liu et al., 2017; Ingrao et al., 2023). In Peña Blanca, the lack of rain produced a mega-drought that affected the economic and social practices of agriculture and farming. It started 20 years before, around 2000, and marked an important transition in the collective memory. It occurred within a generation and changed the face of Peña Blanca and its traditions.

The dimensional nature of drought’s causes and effects becomes evident in how local practices of cultivation and livestock grazing inadvertently contributed to the desertification and soil degradation process. Peña Blanca’s economy was traditionally based on extensive wheat cultivation and family-based livestock husbandry (mainly sheep, goats, and occasionally cows) ⁵ . Many local traditions developed around the collective seeding and harvesting of grain. These were critical annual moments when the community was reunited, solidarity ties were renovated, and families were reconciled. However, all these traditional events disappeared with the diminishing rainwater and the abandonment of collective agriculture due to soil erosion.

Therefore, with the start of the mega-drought and the abandonment of cultivation, economic pressure fell on livestock farming, at least for the first decade. While cultivating became almost impossible, families could still farm animals, buy them pasture if necessary, or migrate to the Andes in drier times. This shift reflects how communities adapt their livelihoods to changing environmental conditions (Errázuriz, 2014). However, given the water scarcity, farming animals became more complex, and the constant and rapid diminishing of grazing animals and livestock was used as a local parameter for measuring water availability. As a complementary method to the more official pluviometry calculation, i.e., the number of milliliters of water that rain annually.

The following excerpt was extracted from an interview with one of the oldest members of the Peña Blanca community. This comuneros has been a criancero all his life, and at the time of the interview, he possessed a few goats.

2. When we had water, we had few goats because … one it was because of the scarcity of water and the other because of pasture: as it doesn’t rain, there is little pasture, and you have to buy it, and buying it means buying back the animal … is not worth it, because a sheep I think that with the pasture that they ate, all of it … I would be paying about four times as much.

The decrease in farming that followed the collapse of wheat cultivation highlights how water scarcity reshaped economic practices and social and geographical dynamics within Peña Blanca. As for wheat cultivation, several collective traditions, such as grazing, shearing, and transhumance, disappeared. As wells dried, rain diminished, and the number of animals decreased, families relocated closer to the central area of Peña Blanca, which has a central water distribution system (Di Tullio, 2023).

Moreover, younger generations started migrating toward urban areas for new jobs. These movements illustrate the reconfiguration of hydrosocial relations where access to water and new sources of income become defining factors in shaping livelihoods, settlement patterns and community fragmentation. The interplay between natural water systems and human responses highlights the co-production of water scarcity and adaptation, revealing how water operates as both a material resource and a powerful social actor within this context.

Throughout history, agricultural communities–generally located in poor lands and drought-ravaged regions–have been perceived as the “non-capitalist Other” in contrast with the ideas of modernisation (Alexander, 2006) and as marginalised political subjects. As Alexander highlights in the public consciousness of Chile, these communities are images of “backward rural slums” (2006: 141) with little hope of improving life. This created a dichotomic perception between the modern urban areas and the poor rural communities.

However, the division between rural living conditions and urban centres is also created by the comuneros, who often look at urban areas as chaotic lifestyles and are utterly ignorant of what is happening in the land. This dichotomy is also represented in interviews through different aspects of water perception such as 1) water presence–tap water in urban areas and water harvesting by wells, rain or fog in Peña Blanca, 2) water quantity–water abundance in urban areas versus water scarcity in rural ones and 3) water quality. The last point needs broader clarification since water quality has two main dimensions.

On the one hand, in some parts of Peña Blanca, water quality impacts the comuneros’ wellbeing. This is because even when water is present, it is often rich in calcium and magnesium, resulting as salobre or brackish (Di Tullio, 2023). This water is considered heavy and has a high presence of limestone. This happens especially in Las Pajas, creating, again, new internal geographical inequalities. This dimension clearly emerges in the interview with one member of the Peña Blanca water committee.

3. […] They have a very brackish water system in Las Pajas. Of course, they have a lot of water but they don't have good water. […] It's not good for drinking, for irrigation […] but because they don't know that this water is not good for irrigation, it's not good for the plants, they will irrigate but it's not good. It won’t grow plants. If you see the difference, for example, here you have forest, pines, a lot of water … but go down there to Las Pajas and see … there’s nothing!

The quality and the taste of water then contribute to creating a new perception of the hydrosocial territories and reinforcing the idea of different accesses to water and the marginalisation from central distribution systems.

On the other hand, several comuneros in the interviews have underlined how water in urban areas is bad because of the use of chlorine to clean and sterilise it. In the community, however, they prefer not to use chlorine because it alters the taste and quality of water. This aspect emerged in the same interview with the water committe’s member.

4. No, this water is totally natural, without any kind of chemical, chlorine or anything else, why not chlorine?

In this sense, water is integrated into a double framework of purity/impurity. On one side, rural water is considered impure because it is hard water and because it lacks the presence of chlorine. On the other side, however, it is urban water that represents the impure, chlorinated (and thus, not-natural) water. According to the comuneros, in urban areas, people are far from the reality of water presence, extraction and distribution that they experience in their lands. Water scarcity is understood not only in terms of drought but also attributed to poor quality and the marginalisation from national water management, control, distribution and governance ⁶ .

The issue of water and governance brings attention to another theme, that of mental health, especially in terms of fear for future possibilities, anxiety and stress. The following excerpts show the interconnection between water scarcity, infrastructure, governance, and livestock. These excerpts are extracted from a second interview conducted with the president of Peña Blanca. At this time, his son was also present and participating in the conversation, offering a similar perspective, even though they represent two generations. Water scarcity isolates the older members of the population and causes precarity for the younger ones, especially those with livestock.

6. We don't have a river nearby that flows into the ground. We don't have glaciers, and we are very far from the Cordillera … so we practically depend on if it rains, a certain amount of water can infiltrate. If it doesn’t rain … where does it come from? Where does the water come from? So, this causes a little bit of stress, especially for the people with animals … we are already seeing…

The social dimension of drought, including economic and psychological effects, is vividly illustrated through personal and collective experiences within Peña Blanca hydrosocial territories. The psychological stress and anxiety about future water availability, as described in the interviews, align with literature that highlights the mental health impacts of prolonged drought (Vins et al., 2015). In this sense, effective water governance is crucial for managing scarce resources and ensuring equitable distribution. These narratives underscore how water scarcity transcends its material absence to become a force that shapes social relations, governance structures and mental health. Community efforts, such as the proposal for deep wells and collaboration with municipal authorities, exemplify the negotiation and adaptation required to manage these hydrosocial tensions. Once again, the multidimensionality of water emerges, connecting governance issues to social and psychological phenomena. This reinforces the necessity for integrated and participatory water management strategies recognising water as a key player in influencing hydrosocial relationships (Batisha, 2015).

In Peña Blanca, several solutions were proposed by the community, resulting in two main projects. The first one was the construction of deeper wells in the area and two APRs (artisanal rural water system). The second consisted of implementing several atrapanieblas to capture fog and turn it into water. For the construction of wells, the comuneros needed money and support from the Ovalle municipality, and thus, the solution was beyond their sole autonomy. They succeeded in implementing two APRs, directed and managed by the committee of potable water, a group of comuneros. The committee regulates water consumption within the community, ensures payment for overconsumption, repairs the water system when broken, and tries to find grants to facilitate the existing system (Di Tullio, 2023).

The two APRs built in Peña Blanca ensured potable water and domestic distribution. Before the APRs, the community got the water from the domestic wells: each property had one. Due to the drought, the underground water levels continued to drop, and the wells dried up over time. Therefore, with the initial support from the province, the community built two deep wells, which, with pump and pipe systems, distribute water to (almost) all the houses in Peña Blanca. The other project was focused on using the high fog presence of the area as a water source for reforestation and animal drinking. The following excerpts answer the same question: what do you think about the atrapanieblas’ implementation? The first one is extracted from an interview with two women living in the margins of Peña Blanca and the second one from a member of the FUAD - the NGO that operates in Peña Blanca.

8. S1: I think that’s why I’m grateful that we have fog and that we can have atrapanieblas because there is so much water scarcity. S2: and the fog comes through with water, and all this water is lost. S1: we have a town with fog. It's typical that there is fog here.

Fog Collectors, or atrapanieblas, are explored in the literature as a technology for capturing water from fog in arid regions. The interviews show that the overall perception of the project Atrapanieblas Comuneros was successful in finding alternative water sources and an example of virtuous environmental concern. Despite being a simple infrastructure, atrapanieblas are crucial materially and symbolically for the community. Implementing these infrastructures affected multiple dimensions: first, it enhanced sustainable projects and the fight against desertification. Second, it moved the community to collaborate once again. Third, it positively impacted mental health, giving new hope for a possible future in Peña Blanca. Fourth, it started a process of self-governance and empowerment, especially for women.

Nevertheless, there have been oppositions and contrasts since implementing any infrastructure is never neutral and concerns the political sphere more than the technical one (Ballestero, 2019). The atrapanieblas in Peña Blanca have been implemented on a hill called Cerro Grande, which is the only place in Peña Blanca with constant fog presence. Due to the presence of fog, the Cerro Grande also represents one of the few places where the vegetation is sufficient for animal pasture. For this reason, the project required putting up a fence to close the area with the infrastructure so that animals could not enter and disrupt the nets. The fence, however, for some comuneros, represented another obstacle in finding grass to feed their livestock. The following excerpts reveal how the project Atrapanieblas Comuneros has received contrasting opinions and modified territorial and social geographies. These comuneros are a minority but represent the perceptions of atrapanieblas’ effectiveness for the opposing side, indicating that the atrapanieblas provide insufficient water and benefit external entities more than the local community. The excerpts come from the same interview with one of the comuneros of the Las Pajas area–the driest area in Peña Blanca–that expresses concern regarding the Atrapanieblas Comuneros project.

10. No … I mean, many people think, maybe you also think, that the atrapanieblas are a solution, that they have water to distribute to people … it is not enough; it does nothing.

Communities are never homogenous, and internal conflicts should always be explored. However, in Peña Blanca, most of the comuneros voted in favour of the project and perceived it as a successful implementation. Despite the controversy, the atrapanieblas project gave the community a way to partially address the socio-environmental issue of water scarcity, functioning as a socially binding tool and an ecological solution. Hence, they created new socio-environmental conflicts but also addressed problems of stress and anxiety for the future, desertification and soil degradation, and water availability for vegetation and animals.

As we have seen, communities such as Peña Blanca are often marginalised by national water policies in Chile that favour private and international companies (Alexander, 2006; Budds, 2013). Therefore, the concerns expressed in interviews 10 and 11 reflect broader questions about who benefits from essential resources and how to address issues of fairness and equity in water governance. These concerns not only regard local practices but also refer to national and international water access and distribution mechanisms. In the context of Chile’s water politics, the atrapanieblas offered an alternative and fertile example of autonomous community governance and empowerment.

The atrapanieblas’ implementation transformed the hydrosocial territory of Peña Blanca through the re-significance of fog presence and water absence. They transformed the relations between people, spaces and materiality, functioning as generators of agency (Di Tullio, 2023) for local people and as connectors for creating new social ties. For instance, the national and international visibility of the project created spaces for local entrepreneurship (artisanal products, slow tourism, education programs, hiking and so forth), allowing new forms of economic and cultural flows that served as a counter-narrative for enhancing self-autonomy and self-governance.