Coordination of Multiple Mechanisms for Addressing Eco-Environmental Damage in China’s Ecological and Environmental Code

Abstract

China’s existing regime for eco-environmental damage remedies is beset by prominent practical dilemmas, including fragmented avenues of redress, conflicting normative provisions, and a poorly integrated theoretical framework. In this context, the legislative formulation of the Ecological and Environmental Code provides a systematic institutional opportunity to standardize and integrate the scattered eco-environmental remediation mechanisms in place. A comprehensive analysis of the theoretical bottlenecks and normative deficiencies embedded in China’s diversified environmental remedy mechanisms shows that clarifying the meaning of eco-environmental damage and affirming its private-law orientation in the Civil Code are of crucial theoretical and practical importance for constructing a coherent and standardized system of environmental remedies. To further refine the coordination and consultation mechanisms between different types of environmental litigation, it is essential to achieve effective integration between ecoenvironmental damage compensation actions and civil public interest litigation.

A tiered eco-environmental litigation system should be built on the basic logic of prioritizing administrative remedies, treating procuratorial public interest litigation as a supplementary judicial avenue, and enabling social organizations to participate in related cases on a parallel basis. In addition, it is crucial to clearly affirm the civilcontractual nature of eco-environmental consultation agreements, to delineate in a systematic way the boundaries between public-law and private-law modes of redress, to optimize the procedural sequencing of different types of environmental litigation, and further standardize the pre-litigation consultation procedures.