Beki McElvain

Beki is a Ph.D. student in the Department of City and Regional Planning (DCRP). She's a big fan of using spatial data visualization tools to help understand complex sociopolitical problems. Her interests include disaster governance, knowledge politics, and development finance. She has worked for state and local governments as a planner, and in the field of disaster risk reduction in program management and consulting. She is currently in the field in Mexico where she’s studying the ‘muddy politics’ of climate change and state responsibility. While cities can anticipate an increasing frequency and severity of climate related disasters, political uncertainty and global pandemic fallout are producing fiscal crises in state and local economies. This convergence of crises exposes a politics that upends implicit assumptions about the existence of a functioning state and its role in addressing climate risk. Her current research explores how this muddiness came to the surface in Mexico City, where a recent political regime shift and pandemic pressures resulted in deep austerity measures, which have dismantled Mexico’s complex infrastructure of bonds and trusts used for disaster recovery and climate adaptation in the capital. Characterizing Mexico City as a case of ‘planning in the mud’ that is becoming increasingly pervasive globally, my work traces adaptation finance to explore how urban resilience is made and unmade in increasingly uncertain times.