Speaker: Weila Gong, University of California-San Diego

Why are some Chinese cities more successful than others in initiating and implementing low-carbon policy actions? Despite being the world’s largest carbon emitter, China has committed to peak carbon emissions before 2030 and to achieving carbon neutrality by 2060. Since the early 2010s, Beijing has selected over one hundred low-carbon pilot regions—from townships to cities to provinces—to explore policy solutions for decoupling economic growth from fossil-fuel use. In her new book, Implementing a Low-Carbon Future, Weila Gong finds variation in levels of low-carbon policy institutionalization across the case studies. This includes varying successes of the standards, regulations, and laws put into place through these policy experiments. Based on original research including extensive expert interviews, comparative case studies, and process tracing of the low-carbon policy experimentation in these pilot cities, Gong opens the black box of the subnational climate policy process in China’s centralized political system and identifies mid-level local bureaucrats as playing an essential “bridge leader” role in successful implementation despite changes in political leadership.

Weila Gong is a nonresident scholar at UC San Diego’s 21st Century China Center and a visiting scholar at UC Davis’s Center for Environmental Policy and Behavior. She is the author of Implementing a Low-Carbon Future: Climate Leadership in Chinese Cities (Oxford University Press, 2025). With over ten years of experience working on the politics and policy of low-carbon energy transitions with a focus on China, she holds a Ph.D. in political science from the Technical University of Munich and has held fellowships at Georgetown University, Harvard Kennedy School, and UC Berkeley School of Law.

We would like to thank the MIT Sustainable Urbanization Lab, the University of British Columbia’s School of Community and Regional Planning, and the Harvard Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies for supporting this event.  Please subscribe to our mailing list if you’d like to receive e-mail notifications: http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/urbanchinaseminar.

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