Can integrated legal and administrative governance reduce corporate carbon emissions?

Traditional environmental governance often relies on a single regulatory form, necessitating the exploration of more comprehensive integrated governance models. Utilizing the pilot program of procuratorial public interest litigation in China as a quasi-natural experiment, this study investigates the impact of integrated legal and administrative governance on corporate carbon emissions and the underlying mechanisms. The findings demonstrate that this governance model significantly reduces corporate carbon emissions. Mechanism tests reveal that the policy functions by strengthening institutional constraints, incentivizing green investments, mobilizing public environmental supervision, and heightening corporate litigation risks. Heterogeneity analyses indicate that factors such as executives’ environmental experience, industry pollution attributes, regional rule of law levels, and market competition exert differential effects on the policy’s impact. Additionally, our analysis reveals that the policy further enhances firms’ overall ESG performance. These findings confirm that integrating judicial oversight with administrative supervision is a viable pathway for achieving carbon neutrality, offering valuable insights for constructing a multi-stakeholder environmental governance system.