Gauri Nagpal

Gauri Nagpal is a doctoral candidate in City and Regional Planning, and her research focuses on climate action, governance, and informality in the Global South. Her work examines how cities navigate decarbonization under conditions of fiscal constraint, with a particular emphasis on how carbon markets and climate finance are translated through the everyday practices of urban governance. Her current research explores carbon markets as fiscal workarounds in southern cities, showing how urban actors repurpose climate finance instruments to assemble development pathways amid debt, austerity, and infrastructural precarity.

Before beginning her Ph.D., Nagpal worked with International Programs at the Ford Foundation, where she tracked global grants and built relationships with high-level government officials and international organizations to scale the foundation’s initiatives. She also consults with the World Bank Group’s Global Facility for Disaster Risk Reduction, supporting risk-informed land-use planning to enhance city resilience. Nagpal has been involved in research with institutions such as the Bloomberg Center for Cities, the Center for International Development at the Harvard Kennedy School, Rio de Janeiro’s Secretariat for Urbanism, Infrastructure and Housing, and the Indian Institute for Human Settlements. She is also the founder of an initiative providing affordable electric vehicles tailored for urban informal workers in Indian cities. She holds dual master’s degrees in Urban Planning and Design Studies from Harvard University and a fellowship in Urbanism from the Indian Institute for Human Settlements.