Dr. Weila Gong
Visiting Scholar, University of California, Davis
Weila Gong: Implementing a Low-Carbon Future–Climate Leadership in Chinese Cities
Climate and Governance
Climate New Research
Implementing a low-carbon future–climate leadership in Chinese cities
Title
Weila Gong: Implementing a Low-Carbon Future–Climate Leadership in Chinese Cities
Time
February 23, 2026
6:00PM - 7:00PM ET
Venue
Online via Zoom. Please register to participate.
About
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.
Speaker
Bio
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.
Readings
- Gong, Weila. 2026. Implementing a Low-Carbon Future: Climate Leadership in Chinese Cities. Studies in Comparative Energy and Environmental Politics. Oxford University Press.