Abstract: Improving the modern environmental governance system to promote the coordinated environmental governance is an important measure to achieve the comprehensive green transformation of the economy and society. Based on the “structure-process” model and the text analysis method, this study examines the impact and mechanism of environmental collaborative governance on the ESG performance of heavily polluting enterprises by taking the A-share heavily polluting industries from 2010 to 2021 as samples. The findings show that collaborative environmental governance can improve the ESG performance of the heavily polluting enterprises. The mechanism analysis reveals that environmental collaborative governance can promote green innovation and improve the internal control quality of heavily polluting enterprises, thus improving their ESG performance. The heterogeneity analysis reveals that the improvement effect of environmental collaborative governance on the ESG performance of the heavily polluting enterprises is more significant in regions with larger local government scale and higher public environmental attention. To this end, we need to accelerate the construction of a modern environmental governance system; we should also take precise measures in deepening the coordinated governance of the environment.

Key words: environmental collaborative governance, heavily polluting enterprises, corporate ESG performance