The Core Functional Space and Institutional Shaping of Environmental Administrative Public Interest LitigationConcurrently on the Improvement of the “Procuratorial Public Interest Litigation Law (Draft)”

Although environmental administrative public interest litigation bears the name of litigation, its practice exhibits an operational pattern characterized by the “dominance of pre-litigation procedures and the marginalization of litigation procedures.” Due to its tendency towards administrativ formalization in terms of power attributes, the non-self-sufficient nature of its institutional structure, and the instrumental characteristics of its value function, the pre-litigation procedure struggles to bear the responsibility of serving as the institutional foundation. The true foundation of environmental administrative public interest litigation lies in its litigation procedures. Based on the inherent stipulations of litigation, its core functional space should be positioned in the adjudication and judgment of substantive disputes, establishing legal benchmarks for administrative performance through judicial decisions. Currently, the construction of this core functional space in environmental administrative public interest litigation is significantly inadequate, mainly manifested in the limited scope for litigation, the absence of substantive disputes in cases, and the ineffectiveness of the adjudicative function. To shape the core functional space of this system, a systematic institutional guarantee mechanism should be established at the legislative level: by restricting the procuratorial organs’ discretionary power in procedures to prevent the improper disposition of substantive dispute cases, improving the pre-litigation coordination mechanism to achieve effective diversion of non-substantive dispute cases, and reshaping the Court’s adjudicative positioning to safeguard the reorientation of judicial adjudication to its proper function.Given that the “Ecological and Environmental Code” has already provided principled provisions for environmental administrative public interest litigation, the “Procuratorial Public Interest Litigation Law (Draft)” should undertake the task of detailed legislative specification.