Dr Beki McElvain

Beki McElvain’s interdisciplinary research agenda synthesizes urban and economic geography, social studies of finance, climate and disaster risk, and critical perspectives on development throughout the global South. Drawing on grounded political economy, critical planning, and STS approaches, Beki’s work examines the ways shifting state and development finance strategies are changing urban climate and disaster governance in the global South. She is particularly interested in the growing prevalence of market-oriented insurance instruments for disaster recovery in urban environments, new forms of resistance and urbanization shaped by the financialization of risk, and ongoing efforts to ‘innovate’ urban climate adaptation within a global system of private capital.

In addition to her research and academic commitments, Beki is an active member of the Urban Climate Finance Network, an international group of more than 50 scholars from institutions in 22 countries working on critical environmental issues. Beki also serves on the board of the Economic Geography Specialty Group with the American Association of Geographers and co-organizes the Women in Economic Geography Social Hour for the Royal Geographical Society. 

Beki’s doctoral research was situated in Mexico City, and consisted of a three-year ‘extended ethnography’ of how Mexico’s shifting state relationships with development finance institutions relate to efforts to govern disaster and climate risk. With the aid of competitive research grants—including significant support from the US Department of Education (USDE-FLAS) and the National Science Foundation (NSF-INFEWS) through a Blum Centre for Developing Economies fellowship—Beki looked at the ways sovereign disaster governance structures are being displaced to global capital markets through development finance under conditions of political uncertainty in Mexico.

Findings from this research demonstrate that as disaster governance in global Southern states is pushed to global markets through development-brokered risk-transfer instruments, failure to insure actually-existing disaster risk conditions in urban peripheries encourages improvisational self-built ‘autorecovery’ practices that reproduce risk through new forms of urbanization and uneven development. This work also uncovers how development finance institutions' attempts to ‘fix’ surplus private capital through risk-transfer insurance are complicated by ‘resilience’ discourses, which drive market-oriented investment while limiting radical activism. Finally, this research shows how Mexico's shifting political landscape and austerity measures disrupt traditional disaster intervention pathways, creating new opportunities for capital accumulation in emerging climate finance markets.

These emerging modes and markets are not specific to Mexico or Latin America, but a problem space situated in an interconnected, climate changing world shaped by global capital and development finance. Drawing on her findings in Mexico—including recent evolving work on development-brokered catastrophe bonds and improvisation in post-hurricane Acapulco—Beki’s current research turns to the city of Durban, where debates over the appropriate political, economic, and legal frameworks for climate and disaster finance are ongoing and emerging. This project presents opportunities to ask and answer critical questions about established versus developing climate policy and disaster governance, while generating new insights for urban and economic geography on the ways cities integrate—or resist—development-driven climate finance intervention in the global South.

Beki teaches across economic, political, urban, and development geography, focusing on political economy as it pertains to climate and disaster governance, insurance, risk and recovery in global Southern contexts.

• McElvain, B. (2023). Autorecovery and everyday disaster in Mexico City’s peripheries. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 41(2), 253–274. https://doi.org/10.1177/02637758231161613
• McElvain, B. (2023). “Fixing” finance? The dialectical publics of resilient disaster governance in Mexico City. Urban Geography, 0(0), 1–22. https://doi.org/10.1080/02723638.2023.2234780
• Knuth, S., Cox, S., Savareh, S., Taylor, Z., Morris, J., and McElvain, B. (2023). “Interrupted Rhythms and Uncertain Futures: Mortgage Finance and the (Spatio-) Temporalities of Climate Breakdown.” Journal of Urban Affairs.  https://doi.org/10.1080/07352166.2023.2229462
• Moreno Carranco, M., McElvain, B. (2020). “Life Above, Rubble Below: A Case of Historically Produced Risk & Perception in Mexico City.” Ardeth Magazine06: Contingency. https://doi.org/10.17454/ARDETH06.12
• Nikolaou, S., Diaz-Fanas, G., Garini, E., & McElvain, B. (2019). “Dried Lakes Do Tell Tales: Seismic Soil Amplification in Mexico City.” Geo-Strata. Geo Institute of ASCE, 23(2), 40-46. https://doi.org/10.1061/geosek.0000131