Litigation is, by design, the way to challenge most government action. This is a big difference, and is even used within government, for example when a state s

Litigation is, by design, the way to challenge most government action. This is a big difference, and is even used within government, for example when a state sues the federal government to challenge a law. For Constitutional things that is true in any country with a federalist system, since if a state/province argues the national government overstepped its authority, some kind of constitutional court needs to resolve the dispute. But the U.S. uses it even in statutory disputes. Congress will pass a fairly general law, delegate enforcement to bodies such as the EPA, and then you have years of litigation between the EPA, a state, and maybe even a municipality, over things such as new transit systems. In many other countries, even large ones, this is done more centrally. For example, if Paris decides to build a new line on the Paris metro, it will present a proposal to the national legislature, which will (if it agrees) pass a law specifically authorizing the construction of that line. After that happens, the line expansion becomes definitionally legal: the national parliament has passed a law authorizing it, which supersedes any previous laws, except for the constitution itself. So there is no grounds for anyone to sue to block the line on the basis of other laws (environmental laws, noise ordinances, etc.), since the legislature is presumed to have already weighed all those factors in passing the law authorizing the metro expansion. The U.S. Congress instead prefers to pass general guidelines and leave it up to the courts to decide whether a particular metro line follows those guidelines or not.