POLICY AND PRACTICE REVIEWS article
Front. Mar. Sci.
Sec. Marine Affairs and Policy
Volume 12 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fmars.2025.1683006
Approaches to Legal Governance in Constructing Nanhai National Marine Park
Provisionally accepted
Yuwen Huang1*
Minyou Yu2- 1Hubei University of Automotive Technology, Shiyan, China
- 2Wuhan University, Wuhan, China
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As a globally significant marine ecosystem, the South China Sea faces multiple challenges including overfishing, ecological degradation, and geopolitical conflicts. To balance ecological conservation with resource development needs, establishing a South China Sea National Marine Park has emerged as a critical strategy. This paper employs literature analysis, comparative research, and policy evaluation methods to investigate legal governance frameworks for the marine park. The study reveals that China's current marine conservation legal framework faces challenges such as fragmented legislation, weak enforcement mechanisms, and inadequate integration between international and domestic laws, which hinder cross-border ecological cooperation. To address these issues, the paper proposes enhancing specialized domestic legislation, optimizing enforcement and supervision systems, and promoting regional marine conservation agreements to establish a legal framework tailored to the South China Sea's unique characteristics. The research also demonstrates that legal development for the marine park must reconcile ecological integrity with geopolitical realities, fostering regional cooperation and trust through legal innovation. This study offers a feasible legal pathway for ecological governance in disputed waters while laying the foundation for sustainable blue economy development.
Keywords: National Marine Park, Nanhai (South China Sea), Ocean governance, jointprotection, Marine environmental protection, regional cooperation, China
Received: 10 Aug 2025; Accepted: 01 Oct 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Huang and Yu. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Yuwen Huang, huangyuwen@whu.edu.cn
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