Local Environmental Legislation Practices in China After the 2015 Amendment to the Legislation Law

DOI

10.2991/978-2-38476-569-0_29How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Legislation Law; Local Legislation; Local Environmental Legislation; Environmental Governance

Abstract

Since the 2015 revision of China’s “Legislation Law,” the number of local legislative bodies vested with legislative powers has significantly increased. Following this expansion, local legislative practices in the environmental sector have achieved notable successes, including the active exploration of People’s Congress-led legislative models, a considerable increase in the quantity of local environmental legislation, and moderate innovations in legislative themes. However, despite these achievements, local environmental legislation faces several challenges, including insufficient coordination of legislative content at the same level, high levels of homogeneity in legislative content, and limited support for local legislation on the dual-carbon goals. The three core principles of legislative work in China are law-based legislation, democratic legislation, and scientific legislation. Currently, issues of local environmental legislation violating or conflicting with higher-level laws in the vertical hierarchy have significantly improved. Based on this, this paper proposes that, while ensuring the principle of “law-based legislation,” future efforts in local environmental legislation should place greater emphasis on democratic and scientific legislation. Therefore, the optimization of local environmental legislation requires an integration of the following goals and pathways: in democratic legislation, local legislative bodies need to continuously strengthen whole-process people’s democracy; in scientific legislation, local legislative bodies should focus on regional environmental collaborative legislation; and lastly, to return to the value of local legislation, local legislative bodies should utilize multiple avenues to ensure that local environmental legislation can contribute experience to national legislation.

Copyright

© 2026 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Chuyi Zhong
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/05/01
TI  - Local Environmental Legislation Practices in China After the 2015 Amendment to the Legislation Law
BT  - Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Educational Development and Social Sciences (EDSS 2026)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 236
EP  - 247
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-38476-569-0_29
DO  - 10.2991/978-2-38476-569-0_29
ID  - Zhong2026
ER  -