Coupling coordination between higher education and environmental governance: Evidence of western China

Exploring the coupling coordination mechanism between higher education and environmental governance is conducive to understanding the mutual interactions between them and thus enhancing mutual development. This study constructs the coupling coordination mechanism and the aggregated evaluation index system to measure the mutual coordination relations between them, assesses the performances and the coupling coordination degrees between them in the case of western provincial regions in China, and proposes countermeasures based on the prediction results. It is found that the performances of higher education are relatively more stable than those of environmental governance, and the distributions of the average performance grades exist noticeable geographical differences. Besides, the coupling coordination degrees increase with mild fluctuations with relatively small spatial variations, demonstrating the balanced and similar coordinated development status among regions; furthermore, in the future, the gaps in the coordination status among regions will gradually decline. This study highlights the mutual coordination mechanism between the two subsystems, compares the coupling coordination status among regions both temporally and spatially, and proposes specific, generalizable development suggestions that contribute to the academic sector, policymakers, ecology, and sustainability.