Synergy or contradiction: Environmental concerns, digital empowerment and green technology innovation

Green technological innovation requires both top-down policy intervention and bottom-up public participation. This study utilizes textual analysis to identify environmental concerns expressed by governments and the public. It evaluates the respective and joint effects of these concerns on green technological innovation across 236 Chinese cities from 2012 to 2022. The findings indicate that public environmental concerns stimulate green innovation development, while government concerns enhance innovation dynamics but hinder improvements in innovation capacity. Further analysis reveals a negative synergy between public and governmental concerns regarding innovation capacity. Digital technology moderates these relationships: it induces a U-shaped effect on the impact of government concerns and an inverted U-shaped effect on public concerns, transforming their mutual exclusivity into complementarity. Therefore, it is necessary to activate the synergistic effect of government and public environmental attention through top-level design, build a multi-agent collaborative green innovation ecosystem, and rely on moderate digital technology empowerment to overcome synergy barriers, providing systematic support for green innovation.