Governance Configurations and Corporate Green Innovation: A Configurational Analysis

Green innovation has become a strategic choice for firms responding to environmental regulation and seeking competitive advantage. Prior research has focused primarily on the independent effects of internal and external governance elements, yet how these elements combine into configurations remains underexplored. Drawing on stakeholder theory, this study adopts a configurational perspective and employs fuzzy‐set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA) to examine how internal and external governance elements jointly shape green innovation. The findings reveal three pathways: externally‐driven, internally‐driven, and synergistic balanced. No single governance element is necessary for high green innovation. The relationship among external governance elements depends on internal governance strength. When internal governance is limited, government subsidies, green investors, and supply chain finance operate synergistically. When internal governance is strong, government support and market capital become substitutable. The relationship among internal governance elements depends on the dominant resource source. When internal resources dominate, shareholder balance, executive compensation intensity, and technical directors reinforce one another. When external resources dominate, technical directors and executive compensation intensity appear in mutually exclusive configurations. These findings suggest that effective governance depends on coherence among selected elements rather than comprehensiveness across all dimensions. The study extends the stakeholder theory tradition on prioritization and trade‐offs by identifying the configurational conditions under which governance elements operate in synergy, substitution, or mutual exclusivity, offering a configurational lens for understanding corporate green innovation governance.