Recent Developments in China’s Coastal Zone Management Legislation: An Appraisal

Abstract

The coastal zone has become one of the areas with the most serious environmental problems and has concentrated conflicts between land development and protection in China. It is the choice of many countries to regulate and balance coastal resource utilization and environmental protection by legal means. However, China has not yet issued comprehensive legislation on coastal zone management at the national level, while some coastal provinces and cities have enacted local legislation. This study first systematically reviews China’s coastal zone management legislation at both the national and local levels, paying particular attention to those laws enacted in the past decade and subsequently looks into the core regimes adopted in China’s coastal zone management. From the perspective of achievements, the legislative framework of China’s coastal zone management legislation is relatively complete, with increasingly diverse legislative subjects and increasingly refined legal provisions, providing a strong normative basis for coastal zone management. Nevertheless, existing legislation also faces challenges such as insufficient systematization, inefficient coordination mechanisms and incomplete legislative content which impact the practical effectiveness of coastal zone management legislation. Based on China’s national conditions, this study proposes two suggestions for future improvements. On one hand, in terms of legislative principles, coastal zone legislation should embody a concept of integrated management and establish substantive principles of systematization, protection priority, prevention and precaution, justice and equality while following the principle of non-contradiction in legislative form. On the other hand, in terms of legislative content, the institutional system of China’s coastal zone management legislation should be further improved in four aspects, namely, optimizing the coordination mechanisms, introducing incentive mechanisms, strengthening public participation, and improving climate change countermeasures.