**5. Conclusions and Discussion**

As the main actors of environmental protection and green governance at the micro level, corporates play a crucial role in achieving sustainability goals. Based on the upper echelons theory, it is believed that executives from environmental protection backgrounds tend to integrate previous "green" cognitive experience into decision-making behavior, ensuring the improvement of their environmental and economic performance. This study focuses on whether listed companies employing executives with environmental protection backgrounds can promote green innovation and its boundary conditions. The study finds that executives with environmental protection backgrounds enhance green innovation. The positive relationship remains robust when instrumental variables and a series of robustness tests address the endogeneity issue. Further, the positive relationship between executives' environmental protection background and green innovation is strengthened when media attention and board independence are greater. The findings provide insights into the view that executive characteristics impact green innovation.

This study extends the literature on the governance effects of management characteristics and provides new empirical evidence for the study of green innovation. First, this study adds value to the literature on upper echelons theory and green innovation research. Prior research on the effects of executive characteristics on green innovation has focused on the effects of characteristics such as executive compensation, educational background, overseas experience, and executive tenure [5]. However, few studies have put the perspective of the executive's environmental protection background affecting green innovation. Therefore, this study extends the executive's environmental protection background to the field of green innovation research based on upper echelons theory. Second, it adds to the work of Khanra et al. (2022) [27] who examined the strategic management actions taken by executives in introducing green innovation initiatives, further adding to this literature by focusing

on how the executive's environmental protection background influences the boundary mechanisms of green innovation. While previous research has focused on the direct effects of executive characteristics on various strategic choices of firms, scholars have recently called for further exploration of factors that mitigate or enhance these effects [6]. Based on insights from agency theory, this study examines the moderating role of media attention and board independence. This study also supplements the previous interpretation of agency theory and introduces the role of internal and external supervision mechanism [68]. This study extends the view that integrating agency theory and upper echelons theory enriches understanding of the governance functions of these two supervisory mechanisms in the executive's environmental protection background.

#### **6. Recommendation**

To enhance corporate green governance and sustainable development, it is important to leverage the governance strengths of executives and add an "environmental barrier" to corporate business decisions. The government should guide companies to set scientific standards for executive staffing and hire executives who value corporate environmental governance, so that business development can balance financial performance with environmental performance. In addition, executives with environmental protection backgrounds should be given the same rights as their positions to ensure they have a sufficient voice in corporate decision-making to promote sustainable development. Based on the research findings, several practical recommendations are made for governments and corporates.

For the government, it must increase its policy support to encourage corporates to implement green innovation. As a way for corporates to take up social and environmental responsibility, green innovation goals are not only based on the realization of their economic benefits, but also take into account the embodiment of social responsibility, urging enterprises to improve environmental performance and enhance green innovation. The government should build a perfect green innovation system, actively guide the flow of green funds to corporates, and prompt them to eliminate their backward production methods to promote environmental protection and sustainable development of the economy. For example, in the context of low-carbon development, the government should introduce policies and measures to promote green innovation to ensure resource efficiency. It could establish a special fund for corporate green finance or credit. It should follow the principle of differentiation and formulate targeted preferential policies, according to the actual situation of corporates, to support the deep integration of green products, organizational structures, and management processes.

For corporates, it is important to emphasize the role of the environmental protection background of executives in enhancing green innovation. First, boards must consider this characteristic when selecting executives and ensuring that their decisions are consistent with corporate goals. For example, suppose corporates are under pressure for environmental legitimacy (e.g., corporate pollution). In that case, executives with environmental protection backgrounds may be an effective way to make the necessary strategic changes [48]. Executives with an environmental protection background are beneficial from an environmental protection perspective, especially in the context of green innovation, an area considered important for corporate strategy. Hiring executives with environmental protection backgrounds in listed companies helps to encourage green investors to invest in such companies. As the number of executives with environmental protection backgrounds increases, their contribution to green innovation becomes more evident. Therefore, corporates should improve their governance mechanisms. Including executives with environmental protection backgrounds in corporate management can improve management diversity, thus reducing the myopia of management and facilitating the management to make green innovation decisions.

Second, in the era of big data, corporates should promote information dissemination and corporate governance through the media, so that stakeholders can better understand the corporate and improve its information transparency. Corporates should raise the environmental protection awareness of their executives and be more active in disclosing green innovation information. This can alleviate the information asymmetry between enterprises and stakeholders and compensate for the lack of contrast resulting from high stakeholder expectations. Corporates can gain the trust and support of stakeholders, thus promoting green innovation. Corporates should promote information dissemination and corporate governance through the media so that stakeholders can improve the transparency of information and social responsibility of corporates.

Third, since the higher the proportion of independent directors, the easier it is for executives with environmental protection backgrounds to play a role and thus promote green innovation, it is necessary to improve the corporate governance mechanism and improve the supervision mechanism on executives' decision-making process, which can be achieved through measures such as increasing the proportion of independent directors and designing an investment risk-sharing mechanism.
