合法性视角下公众参与对企业绿色技术创新的影响机制研究OACHSSCD

Under the traditional business model,the environmental pollution caused by enterprises'economic growth has had serious negative effects on public health and well-being,which has led the public to place higher environmental requirements on enterprises'technological innovation activities.Consequently,enterprise green technological innovation has attracted increasing scholarly attention.Under the background of environmental governance,it is worth discussing how enterprises can better meet the public's environmental protection needs and enhance their legitimacy to achieve sustainable development.From the perspective of legitimacy,enterprise green technological innovation can be viewed as a process through which firms respond to public environmental demands and build organizational legitimacy.However,two important research gaps remain.On the one hand,there is still a lack of studies grounded in institutional theory that systematically examine the relationship between public participation and enterprise green technological innovation.On the other hand,existing findings on the impact of public participation on enterprise green technological innovation remain inconsistent,and the underlying mechanisms are not yet fully clarified. To address these limitations,this study uses panel data on provincial industrial enterprises in China from 2009 to 2021 and incorporates multiple types of public participants into a unified analytical framework.Based on the institutional theory and the perspective of legitimacy,this paper constructs econometric models to empirically examine the direct effects and underlying mechanisms of different forms of public participation—including media environmental coverage,community residents' participation and ENGOs supervision—on enterprise green technological innovation.In addition,this study further explores the interaction effects among different types of public participation on enterprise green technological innovation.The contributions of this study are as follows.First,it extends the application of institutional theory to the field of enterprise green technological innovation and provides a new analytical perspective for examining how public participation influences enterprise green technological innovation.Second,it enriches the existing literature by examining both the mediating mechanisms and boundary conditions through which public participation affects enterprise green technological innovation.Third,it moves beyond the previous studies that focused on a single type of public actor,thereby expanding the multidimensional understanding of legitimacy and enriching the theoretical framework of enterprise green technological innovation. The empirical results indicate that:First,the direct results show that media environmental coverage and community residents'participation significantly promote enterprise green technological innovation,whereas ENGOs supervision has a significant inhibitory effect on enterprise green technological innovation.These findings remain robust after robustness and endogeneity tests.Second,the mediation mechanism test shows that R&D investment plays a mediating role in the relationship between media environmental coverage and enterprise green technological innovation,whereas no significant mediating effect is found in the relationships involving community residents'participation or ENGOs supervision.The moderation analysis further shows that the level of marketization strengthens the positive effects of media environmental coverage and community residents' participation on enterprise green technological innovation,while weakening the negative effect of ENGOs supervision.Third,further analysis shows that media environmental coverage and ENGOs supervision generate a synergistic driving effect on enterprise green technological innovation.Specifically,an increase in ENGOs supervision(media environmental coverage)enhances the positive effect of media environmental coverage(ENGOs supervision)on enterprise green technological innovation,while other interaction effects are not statistically significant. Based on the above findings,this study proposes four policy implications.First,the government should strengthen legal protection and financial support for the media and ENGOs to enhance their influence in environmental governance.At the same time,the community participation mechanism should be further improved to strengthen the public's voice in environmental governance.Second,enterprises should attach greater importance to environmental legitimacy by establishing sound environmental management systems and formulating appropriate green management strategies to continuously improve environmental protection.At the same time,enterprises should increase the introduction and application of green technologies and expand the recruitment of green R&D personnel,while strengthening communication with social stakeholders in order to gain broader recognition and support.Third,in areas with a high level of marketization,the government should adopt incentive-based policies to strengthen the social expectations and legitimacy pressures for enterprises to actively engage in green technological innovation and enhance the motivation for public participation in environmental governance.In areas with lower levels of marketization,more binding policies and regulatory measures are needed to maintain the normative expectations in environmental governance and encourage enterprises to increase environmental investment.Fourth,it is necessary to actively build an environmental governance system characterized by multi-actor participation and further improve the relevant legal framework.Governments should formulate multi-level and multi-channel policies for public participation in environmental governance,so as to realize the synergistic governance effect of multiple stakeholders.