Government ecological concern and its impact on synergistic pollution and carbon reduction: Evidence from China

This study addresses the increasingly prominent issues stemming from the ongoing degradation of the ecological environment, which pose significant threats to human well-being and have consequently compelled the government to heighten its focus on environmental concerns. With a particular emphasis on the government’s ecological concerns, this study investigates their role in promoting collaborative governance for pollution reduction and carbon mitigation. Employing the fully modified ordinary least squares (FMOLS) and dynamic ordinary least squares (DOLS) methods, this research analyzes the relationship between government ecological concern and the effectiveness of collaborative governance in pollution and carbon reduction. The findings indicate that the government’s ecological concern, economic development, industrial structure, and trade openness can improve the performance of pollution reduction and carbon reduction collaborative governance. Conversely, a negative correlation is observed between urbanization and the effectiveness of such collaborative efforts. Notably, among various categories of government ecological concern, greater attention directed towards environmental pollution, energy consumption, and natural resource management significantly improves the performance of collaborative governance in pollution and carbon reduction. The positive impact of government ecological governance is not consistently sustained; it primarily affects collaborative pollution reduction and carbon mitigation governance at the middle to lower percentiles and exhibits a diminishing effect over time. The causality analysis results of Dumitrescu and Hurlin demonstrate the presence of a reciprocal causal relationship between the government’s ecological concern and pollution reduction and carbon reduction collaborative governance, while there exists a single causal link between economic development, industrial structure, trade opening, urbanization, and pollution reduction and carbon reduction collaborative governance. Drawing on these results, this study presents pertinent policy recommendations to inform and guide pollution reduction and carbon mitigation initiatives, thereby providing valuable insights and references for collaborative governance in this domain.