Linking Green Finance, CSR , and Environmental Strategy to Environmental Performance: The Intervening Role of Green Innovation

Abstract

Amid China's escalating ecological challenges and ambitious dual carbon commitments, understanding what drives environmental performance has become an issue of both scholarly and policy urgency. This study develops and tests an integrated framework in which green finance, corporate social responsibility (CSR), and environmental strategy affect the environmental performance of Chinese enterprises, with green innovation as a mediating mechanism and stakeholders' pressure as a moderating boundary condition. Grounded in the natural resource‐based view, stakeholder theory, and the dynamic capabilities perspective, the model was tested with survey data from 382 managers and executives of Chinese firms. The results show that green finance, CSR, and environmental strategy each have a significant positive effect on environmental performance. Green innovation mediated all three relationships, which is consistent with three separate single‐mediator models and does not rest on a single parallel‐mediation specification. Stakeholders' pressure significantly moderated the relationship between green innovation and environmental performance, strengthening it when stakeholder accountability is high. The findings provide an empirically tested, integrated account of corporate environmental performance and offer specific guidance for enterprises and regulators in China's rapidly evolving sustainability governance landscape.