Bridging gaps between legal considerations and implementation: synergistic governance for China’s shipping decarbonization

Amid global climate governance and the green and low-carbon transition of the shipping industry, China’s success in regulating shipping carbon emissions is crucial to achieving its carbon peak and carbon neutrality goals, as well as advancing international climate governance. As the world’s largest ship-owning nation and the biggest goods trading country, China plays a key role in this effort. This paper systematically examines the current situation of policy-law synergy governance for green and low-carbon shipping in China, based on the analytical framework of Rechtspolitik (legal policy objectives → legal policy instruments → alignment between objectives and instruments). This study finds that China has preliminarily established the legal policy objectives for green and low-carbon shipping, however, it suffers from insufficient quantitative indicators and lacks effective mechanisms to translate policy goals into binding legal obligations. Regarding legal policy instruments, despite the current hybrid regulatory framework incorporating both command-and-control and market-based approaches, market-based instruments have not yet played the leading role and remain confined to pilot programs or principled provisions. To enhance the effectiveness of policy-law synergy governance, this paper proposes three pathways to achieve a dynamic balance between policy flexibility and legal stability, and to enhance governance effectiveness based on the fundamental paradigm of policy-law synergy governance. Those three pathways are constructing a clearly defined policy system and introducing policies exploring the inclusion of the shipping industry into the carbon emission trading market, enacting specific law on carbon peak and carbon neutrality, and promoting the establishment of dedicated chapters on “green and low-carbon shipping” in local regulations of coastal provinces and municipalities. This paper not only provides theoretical insights and practical guidance for the policy-law synergy in green and low-carbon shipping in China, but also offers a transferable governance model for promoting the green and low-carbon transition of the shipping industry in countries at similar developmental stages and facing similar challenges.