The role of environmental justice in advancing carbon dual control through environmental courts

Abstract Achieving China’s “dual-carbon” goals requires effective institutional innovation, and environmental courts may play an important role in this process. Using the establishment of environmental courts as a quasi-natural experiment, this paper examines the effect of environmental judicial specialization on carbon governance. Based on panel data for 284 Chinese cities from 2006 to 2022, we employ a multi-period difference-in-differences approach to estimate the impact of environmental courts on both total carbon emissions and carbon emission intensity. The results show that the establishment of environmental courts significantly reduces both measures. Mechanism analysis suggests that this effect operates through industrial restructuring and technological innovation. Heterogeneity analysis further indicates that the effect is stronger in non-resource-based cities and cities with lower levels of industrial pollution. In addition, green finance plays a differentiated moderating role, suggesting that rule-of-law constraints may complement administrative governance, foster firms’ self-regulated low-carbon compliance, and enable market-based financial instruments to play a greater role. Overall, this paper highlights the role of environmental judicial reform in advancing China’s carbon governance and suggests that better coordination between environmental courts and green finance policies may help build a more effective and differentiated emissions reduction framework.