Weila Gong is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow with the Environment and Natural Resources Program (ENRP) and Science, Technology, and Public Policy Program (STPP) at Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. Gong’s scholarship explores comparative climate and environmental policy and politics. Her research has been driven by understanding the political dynamics of global climate leadership across different levels of government, and she has focused specifically on China, notably its low-carbon energy transitions, low-carbon cities, and greening the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). At the Belfer Center, she examines China’s just transition and the shift away from coal and the U.S.-China cooperation on climate change. Her work has appeared in journals such as China Quarterly and Environmental Politics.

In her book project, Climate Leadership in Chinese Cities, which is under contract with Oxford University Press, Gong examines why some Chinese cities are doing better than others in initiating and implementing low-carbon policy experiments.

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. She 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, Guangzhou, China.