In the new era, ecological protection and high-quality development in the whole Yellow River Basin will face new tasks and challenges, and ecological governance, which is on its way to rule of law, will become an important governance pattern in the future. In the meantime, ecological rule of law is an inevitable choice to promote the modernization of national environmental governance system and governance capacity. Through sorting out and explaining the normative text of the state on the development of ecological protection in the Yellow River Basin in western China and its interpretations, this paper analyzes the transformation of the state's concept on the development of the Yellow River Basin, and then points out the problems existing in the development of ecological rule of law in the Yellow River Basin in the new era. It is mainly reflected in the lack of full embodiment of the concept of systematic development of ecological rule of law, the lack of implementation of local legislation on ecological protection policies, and the lack of positive interaction between environmental policies and other policies. Then starting from improvement of the ecological rule of law norm system in the Yellow River Basin, the coordination between laws and environmental policies to protect the ecological environment and the goal of the integrated implementation of environmental policies should be achieved. The aim is to improve legal norms and environmental policies, to ensure ecological protection and high-quality development of the Yellow River Basin, and to realize the ecological rule of law in the Yellow River Basin.