How Do Multi-Actor Environmental Sentiment Tendencies Affect the Green Transformation of Chinese Energy Companies? The Moderating Role of Economic and Climate Policy Uncertainty

Existing research on green transformation predominantly emphasizes “hard constraints” such as carbon taxes and environmental regulations, while neglecting “soft constraints” shaped by environmental sentiment expressions from key actors such as the public, financial institutions, media, and government. In particular, the collective influence of these multi-actor environmental sentiments remains insufficiently explored. This study fills that gap by constructing a collaborative governance framework using multi-source heterogeneous data from China spanning 2013–2023, including 330 provincial government work reports, 1862 bank annual reports, 2472 newspaper articles, and 68,519 Weibo posts, matched to 4708 firm-year observations of Chinese A-share energy companies. We quantify environmental sentiment tendencies through natural language processing, calculating the index as (negative word frequency − positive word frequency)/total word frequency at the province-year level, thus higher index value indicates more negative sentiment tendency, while green transformation is proxied by ln(green patent applications + 1). The results reveal the following: (1) More negative environmental sentiment tendencies from financial institutions, media, public, and government significantly promote green transformation in energy enterprises, with stronger effects observed from financial institutions and government. (2) Economic and climate policy uncertainty selectively weaken the impact of financial institutions’ sentiment, while the moderating effects for other actors are statistically insignificant. (3) The effect of multi-actor environmental sentiment is more pronounced for firms located in eastern China, operating under high competition or stricter environmental regulations. This study provides a novel, quantified approach to assessing multi-actor environmental sentiment tendencies, affirms the effectiveness of informal governance, and highlights the importance of stable policy in guiding corporate green transformation in emerging economies.