Preventive Environmental Public Interest Litigation Reflection and Restructuring-Beginning with the Green Peafowl Case

Abstract

Triggered by the "Green Peafowl Case," the preventive environmental public interest litigation system has increasingly become a routine subject of legal governance. Through the practical concerns exposed in this case, such as "inaccurate environmental impact assessments" and "ineffective internal and external administrative oversight," its core issues can be identified across three dimensions: litigation requirements, types of litigation, and power conflicts. These include the ambiguity in the legal-interest attributes of lawsuits against fault-free administrative acts, the functional misalignment between civil and administrative systems, and the overlapping, redundant division between administrative and judicial powers. Consequently, preventive environmental public interest litigation urgently requires the application of the ARI model as its research methodology. Internally, it should adopt wrongfulness based on fault liability as its key, achieving a dual translation of major environmental risks and scientifically uncertain matters from scientific expression to normative interpretation. Externally, it should balance the dual horizontal coordination mechanism of "administrative supervision as the mainstay and judicial litigation as the supplement", promoting a profound transformation of administrative agencies from traditional elitist indirect democracy to modern populist deliberative democracy. Internally, a legislative proposal for preventive environmental administrative public interest litigation should be advanced, establishing a sequential litigation order that prioritizes administrative actions and uses civil litigation as a fallback. This will ultimately form an "effective and gap-free" framework for rights protection.