Water Works : Megaprojects and Timescaling in Peru

Driven by an increasing industrial and urban demand for water and other economic and political interests, the Peruvian State has invested heavily in water infrastructures. One such infrastructure is the Majes Siguas Special Project in the Department of Arequipa. This megaproject was envisioned already in the early twentieth century to supply the coastland with irrigation water and thereby developing agriculture in this arid region. The first stage of the project was built in the 1970-80’s, but the second stage was not actualised until the 2000s and is still waiting to be built. Based on ethnography from fieldwork in the realm of the megaproject in 2016 and 2017, this article asks what happens when the materialisation of a megaproject is constantly deferred and explores how the promise it entails is sustained over time by analysing the social processes of temporal scale-making