Weila Gong is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow with the Belfer Center’s Environment and Natural Resources Program and the Science, Technology, and Public Policy Program at Harvard Kennedy School. Her research explores comparative climate and environmental policy and politics, with a focus on China’s low-carbon energy transition, low-carbon cities, and greening the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). At the Belfer Center, her research investigates paths towards deep decarbonization in China, with a special focus on China’s just coal transition and on the energy transition in Inner Mongolia. 

Gong’s dissertation and book project, “Low-Carbon Policy Experimentation in Chinese Cities: Leadership, Resources, and Implementation Strategies,” examines why some Chinese cities are doing better than others in initiating and implementing low-carbon policy experiments. Her work has appeared in the journal China Quarterly.

Previously, Gong was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Science, Technology and International Affairs Program at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service and a visiting Predoctoral Fellow at the Brookings-Tsinghua Center. Gong holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from the Technical University of Munich’s School of Governance. She also holds a Master’s degree in International Relations and a Bachelor’s degree in History from Sun Yat-sen University, China.