Abstract:

Background & Aim: As the threat posed by invasive alien species to China’s ecosystems becomes increasingly severe, improving the governance system has emerged as a crucial issue at present. Although existing studies have explored legal and administrative management issues in the governance of invasive alien species, most of them focus on governance discussions within a single field and fail to conduct systematic analysis from the perspective of the overall policy system. Therefore, in-depth research on the structural dilemmas existing in the policy system for invasive alien species governance—especially the exploration of its holistic construction—still holds significant academic value and practical significance. 

Method: Employing literature review and case analysis methods, we compile public interest litigation cases related to invasive alien species in recent years, introduce judicial cases as practical illustrations, and further demonstrate their actual harms to the ecological environment, public interests, and biological security. 

Results: We sort out the laws and policies regarding invasive alien species in China, and reveal the problems existing in current practice, such as the imperfection of the legal system, the lack of top-level design, the inadequacy of the management list system, the insufficient coordination of the implementation mechanism, and the weakness of basic guarantees and technical support. 

Conclusion: We propose a holistic improvement pathway, which includes the following aspects: at the legislative level, it suggests improving legislation through the codification–special legislation parallel model, strengthening accountability system, and optimizing performance assessment mechanism; at the implementation level, it is necessary to establish regulatory authorities, set up a regional joint conference mechanism, and optimize management list system; and at the support and guarantee level, efforts should be made to promote the marketization of ecological compensation, enhance interdisciplinary collaboration, and implement the system of public bidding for talents to tackle key issues. The purpose of this paper is to provide theoretical and practical references for the governance of invasive alien species.

Key words: invasive alien species, biological invasion, biodiversity, ecological security, legal policies