Dr. Fürst received her PhD degree at the Faculty of Law, University of Amsterdam and her MA degree at the Center from Environment and Development at the University of Oslo. She has a BA in Sinology from Beijing Language and Culture University.

Her research generally looks at environmental regulation and justice in China. In her first project, which culminated in her MA thesis she focused on pollution victims and their access to justice.  This thesis, entitled “Access to Justice in Environmental Disputes: Opportunities and Obstacles for Chinese Pollution Victims” sought to identify various structural, political, financial, technical, legal and cultural obstacles Chinese citizens face in the process of invoking their legal rights. It was based on empirical qualitative data derived from fieldwork in Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region. The thesis used that data to engage with socio-legal literature on rights invocation and apply and further develop this in the context of China’s pollution victims.

Her doctoral project, entitled “Regulating through Leverage: Civil Regulation in China” looks critically at the role that civil society can play in regulation in an authoritarian state like China, focusing on the concept of “civil regulation” which has recently become a new key component of many Chinese environmental protection policy documents. It identifies several different forms of civil regulation and examines both their preconditions and effects. The research includes a near comprehensive set of case-studies of twenty-seventeen environmental NGOs based in fifteen different provinces and shows how weak NGOs with limited regulatory space have been able to successfully push powerful enterprises and governments to start to reduce pollution, using the leverage of the international market or the state to generate pressure. The thesis explains what civil regulation is, what preconditions it requires, how it relates to the state, and what it means in authoritarian settings.

She is now working on several projects focusing on:

• Mapping and analyzing the effect of environmental public interest litigation and tort litigation in China
• Examining the Jing-Jing-Ji air pollution reduction policies from an environmental, economic and social justice perspective
• Smog Art in China

Dr. Fürst has extensive experience in interdisciplinary research through her work as an administrative coordinator for the Sino-Norwegian Center for Interdisciplinary Environmental Research and research fellow at the Social Science Research Council’s China Environment and Health Initiative.

Prior to joining Duke Kunshan University Dr. Fürst work as a consultant on program management and evaluation focusing on environmental governance projects in China. She also has substantial experience in research project design, implementation and monitoring.