Time: 1:30-2:45PM, Wednesday 4 November

Location: AB1087

Speaker: Weila Gong, Nonresident scholar at UC San Diego’s 21st Century China Center; Visiting scholar at UC Davis’s Center for Environmental Policy and Behavior

Abstract

Why are some Chinese cities more successful than others in implementing low-carbon policies within China’s centralized political system? Drawing on China’s low-carbon policy experiments, Weila Gong’s new book, Implementing a Low-Carbon Future, examines why local governments differ in their ability to institutionalize climate policies through standards, regulations, and laws. Based on more than one hundred expert interviews and comparative case studies, Gong opens the black box of local climate policymaking and identifies mid-level bureaucrats as essential “bridge leaders” who sustain policy implementation despite changes in political leadership. Her findings offer broader insights into local governance and climate policy implementation in China.

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.