The impact of public participation in environmental governance on the technical efficiency of enterprise

•This paper uses stochastic frontier analysis to calculate and decompose the total factor productivity of enterprises.•This paper empirically tests the impact of public environmental participation on total factor productivity.•This paper analyses the heterogeneous impact of public environmental participation on firms' total factor productivity improvement. This paper investigates the impact of public participation in environmental governance on the technical efficiency at the firm-level. Using the stochastic frontier method to measure the technological efficiency, we find that the average technical efficiency of enterprises has gradually increased, and the distribution of technical efficiency of enterprises varies by region. We further show that public participation in environmental governance can significantly improve enterprises’ technical efficiency. Finally, the heterogeneity analysis shows that our findings are more pronounced in state-owned firms and small firms.