China’s New Enviromental Public Interest Litigation System:New Developments And Limits

Quite recently, China’s central government has displayed a renewed determinacy to address its environmental problems. A main element within this environmental governance agenda is the role of environmental law. In contrast to the more decisive environmentally-oriented economic and technological initiatives implemented throughout the last few years, the environmental protection legal system has experienced a set of clearly ambivalent signals towards reform. This ambivalence can be most strikingly seen in the recent codification and implementation of one of environmental law’s historically most effective tools:environmental public interest litigation (EPIL).Long advocated for by both domestic and environmental legal scholars abroad, this new tool has been claimed to have the potential to give the Chinese public a much stronger ability to assert their collective public interest in the environment and fight back against those private interests of polluting factories, inactive government regulatory bodies, protectionist local governments and the collusions that breed between these actors and which support the degradation of the environment. With active use of such a tool, it is hoped that more reasonable tradeoffs can be made in favor of the environment and that victims of pollution can receive better legal protection and judicial remedies.Although only time will tell how effective the new EPIL law truly is, it is the goal of this thesis to better understand its near future prospects and limitations. This analysis will be done through two different methods. First, a comparative study with a broad set of other EPIL regimes will be done so as to show their codified differences and their corresponding effects in practice. By demonstrating how these different EPIL regimes in different socio-legal contexts have affected their environmental governance regimes, the strengths and weaknesses of China’s new EPIL code will be able to be more comprehensively compared. For further insight into how this code will likely be implemented, a second analysis will be done on the general legal capacity of China’s main EPIL actors, environmental social organizations. This analysis will rely primarily on the diverse sets of literature on surrounding such groups as well as a case study on one prominent group in Nanjing.Through the combination of these two analysis, it is hoped that the likely regulatory impact of the new law will be better understood and future research of these limitations may be more directly explored for the general improvement of China’s EPIL system.