Cunningham, Dr. Edward

Edward Cunningham is an Ash Institute Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard Kennedy School and an affiliate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.) Industrial Performance Center. Dr. Cunningham graduated from Georgetown University, received an A.M. from Harvard’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, and recently received his Ph.D. from the Department of Political Science at M.I.T. He was selected as a Fulbright Fellow to the PRC, during which time he conducted his doctoral fieldwork as a visiting fellow at Tsinghua University. His primary research interests relate to China’s energy markets, political economy, industrial organization, and comparative business-government relations.

Dr. Cunningham has served as the program officer of the China Public Policy Program at Harvard Kennedy School, worked in Beijing, and studied at Peking University. He has also testified in Washington, D.C., and spoken at industry and academic conferences on issues relating to energy, industrial policy, competitiveness, and governance. While at M.I.T., he served as a core team member and researcher, respectively, of two major multidisciplinary studies. The first research project, a five-year “Globalization Study” of international competitiveness and corporate strategy, examined over 500 leading companies and led to the publication How We Compete (Doubleday, 2005). The second research project, a three-year study of the global coal market, leading energy technologies, and the political economy of energy investment, led to the report The Future of Coal (M.I.T., 2007). He also co-taught a graduate course entitled “Asia in the World Economy” at Harvard Kennedy School for five years.

Dr. Cunningham is the author or a contributing author of several publications, including Global Taiwan (M.E. Sharpe, 2005); “China’s Energy Governance: Perception and Reality,” M.I.T. Center for International Studies (March 2007); “China and East Asian Energy: Prospects and Issues,” Australia-Japan Research Centre, ANU (2008); “Why Pollute? Explaining the Environmental Performance of Chinese Power Plants,” China Economic Quarterly (September 2008); “Greener Plants, Grayer Skies? A Report from the Front Lines of China's Energy Sector,” Energy Policy vol. 37:5 (May 2009); and “Fueling the Miracle: China's Energy Governance and Reform”, in Joseph Fewsmith (ed.) Three Decades of Reform and Opening: Where is China Headed?, Roman and Littlefield, forthcoming.