Can public participation promote regional green innovation?——Threshold effect of environmental regulation analysis

Green innovation is the fundamental approach to harmonize economic and environmental sustainability. Public participation plays a crucial role in solving the problems of “government failure” and “market failure” in regional green innovation. Based on three perspectives: direct public participation, indirect public participation, and ENGOs participation, this paper takes 30 provinces in China from 2010 to 2019 as samples, constructs panel fixed-effects models and adopts multiple linear regressions to investigates the impact of public participation on regional green innovation. The results show that all three types of public participation have a positive impact on regional green innovation, among which ENGOs’ participation has the greatest impact. The effect of direct public participation on green innovation is significantly positive in developed regions but insignificant in underdeveloped regions, while the impact of ENGOs participation is the opposite. The conclusion is still valid after a series of endogeneity and robustness tests. Besides, the threshold regression tests reveal that the impacts of public participation on green innovation shows a threshold effect depending on the intensity of environmental regulation, and only when the intensity of environmental regulation is greater than 0.7495 can public participation play the most effective role.