Marine Ecological Restoration Under Sustainable Governance: Evidence from Chinese Government Audits

The sustainability of marine ecological conservation and restoration, a key issue in the implementation of Sustainable Development Goal 14 (SDG 14), which aims at reducing marine pollution, protecting and restoring marine environments, promoting the sustainable use of marine resources, and strengthening scientific monitoring requirements, depends not only on policy design and financial investment, but more critically on effective coordination among policy implementation, resource management, and performance feedback. This paper analyzes the institutional evolution of marine ecological conservation and restoration audit in China and the main issues and their causes based on the text analysis and qualitative interpretation of the 302 marine ecological issues in the audit reports publicly released by Chinese audit authorities from 2008 to 2024. Audits found that the problems were predominantly in three areas: policy accountability and strategic implementation; project approval and implementation management; and fiscal management and fund coordination. The emergence of these is strongly linked to the fragmentation of department responsibilities, mismatch between project management cycles and ecological restoration cycles, and inadequate coordination between fund allocation and ecological performance. Although some problems were repeatedly reported across different years, their observed temporal and spatial distribution was influenced by the scope of audit coverage and the extent of public disclosure. On this basis, this paper proposes to improve audit oversight in the three areas of policy accountability coordination, project life-cycle management, and the performance of fiscal funds. This is to promote the implementation of SDG 14 requirements along the chain of “objective–resources–projects–monitoring–rectification”, serve as a reference for improving the Chinese supervision and accountability mechanisms for marine ecological conservation and restoration, and provide practical experience from China on the implementation of SDG 14 at the levels of national policy implementation and public accountability.