Xuehua Zhang

Xuehua devotes her education, professional career, and research interests to understand and solve environmental problems. Her research interests include environmental policymaking and implementation, energy policy and enforcement, and rule of law in China. She is currently investigating the role of judicial review in local environmental enforcement through reviewing court case files and interviewing a variety of parties involved in lawsuits in Hubei province of China. Her research examines two types of court cases: environmental administrative lawsuits in which local environmental protection bureaus (EPBs) are the defendants, and court administrative execution cases that are filed by the EPBs to against non-compliant polluters. Her dissertation will be the first empirical analysis of the effects of environmental administrative lawsuits on China’s environmental enforcement.

In the summer of 2004, the Energy Foundation (EF) invited Xuehua to conduct an independent investigation on the effectiveness of China’s Energy Conservation Law in Shanghai. Her policy analysis paper, “Environmental Enforcement and Compliance Capacity Building in China,” was presented to China’s annual ministerial-level Senior Policy Advisory Council.  

Before beginning her IPER PhD in 2002, Xuehua worked as a policy analyst and project coordinator at Resources for the Future, an environmental think-tank based in Washington DC. In this capacity, she worked on a $700,000 pilot project funded by the Asian Development Bank (ADB) to develop a SO2 emissions trading system in Taiyuan, China. She was invited by the Indian Government and US EPA to deliver a talk on the ADB project in 2002 in New Delhi, India. In 1999, she worked at the World Bank as a short-term consultant and conducted the first national mail survey on the major enforcement problems in China. Her survey targeted governmental enforcement officials in 330 major Chinese cities. The survey results provided a basis for her Masters Thesis, “Institutional Constraints on China’s Environmental Enforcement: The Perspective of Local Enforcement Personnel.”

Xuehua received her Master’s degree in environmental policy and resource management from Western Washington University in 2001 and her Bachelor’s degree in engineering (environmental monitoring) at Sichuan University in 1991. Before coming to the United States, she worked for her city, Chengdu municipal EPB, as an environmental engineer in 1991-1996 and helped build the “Living Water Garden”, which is located in the city of Chengdu in Sichuan Province, China, from 1996-1998. This 5.9-acre public park was the first inner city ecological park in the world with water as its theme. Xuehua was the assistant for the designer of the park, Ms Betsy Damon, a well-known environmental artist and founder of Keepers of the Waters. This international award-winning park is a fully functioning water treatment plant, a giant sculpture in the shape of a fish (symbol of regeneration in Chinese culture), a living environmental education center, a refuge for wildlife and plants, and a wonderful place for 10 million people in the city.