Abstract: China’s cumulative stock of coal gangue exceeds 7 billion tons, with an annual increase of approximately 800 million tons. Massive gangue accumulation has caused severe environmental pollution and geological hazards, and campaign-style rectification has proven ineffective in fundamentally breaking the cycle of crackdown and relapse. The newly revised Mineral Resources Law, implemented in 2025, introduces for the first time an independent chapter on “Mining Area Ecological Restoration”, elevating ecological restoration from policy advocacy to statutory obligations. The implementation of ecological restoration necessarily requires large-scale consumption of coal gangue accumulated in mining areas, which objectively provides a mandatory legal driving force for its resource utilization. This paper adopts policy text analysis and institutional analysis to review the three-stage evolution of coal gangue governance policies since 1998. It examines the institutional framework from four dimensions—laws, administrative regulations, technical standards, and local practices—and identifies four major institutional obstacles: lagging supporting laws and regulations, fragmented standard systems, insufficient economic incentives, and inadequate collaborative supervision. As the root obstacle, the lag of supporting legal documents leads directly to the absence of unified standards, insufficient legal support for incentive policies, and ambiguous boundaries of regulatory authority, with these four obstacles cascading into and reinforcing one another. Against this backdrop, this paper constructs a four-dimensional long-term governance mechanism for coal gangue resource utilization, encompassing legal supporting improvement, standard coordination, economic incentive optimization, and collaborative supervision. Three core countermeasures are proposed: firstly, revising and upgrading the Measures for the Comprehensive Utilization of Coal Gangue from a departmental rule to an administrative regulation; secondly, establishing carbon emission reduction accounting methodologies and connecting with the China Certified Emission Reduction（CCER） trading system, so that corporate green governance can generate quantifiable economic returns; and thirdly, establishing an inter-departmental joint conference mechanism while building a nationwide unified whole-process information-based supervision platform. Taking legal supporting improvement as the breakthrough point, these countermeasures simultaneously advance standard coordination and economic incentive optimization, with collaborative supervision ensuring institutional implementation, thereby forming an institutional closed loop founded on legislation, guided by technical standards, driven by market incentives, and safeguarded by normalized supervision, ultimately promoting the transformation of coal gangue governance from campaign-style rectification to institutionalized operation.