The synergistic implementation of green credit policies to accelerate green transition represents a pivotal pathway for achieving high-quality economic development during China’s 14th Five-Year Plan period. This study employs green credit policies enacted by both central and local governments as quasi-natural experiments to empirically investigate their heterogeneous and coordinated effects on enterprises’ green transition, with a specific focus on the dual dimensions of production and emission management. Key empirical findings reveal four critical insights: (1) Divergent Policy Effects: Central green credit policies significantly enhance production-side green transition (e.g., adoption of clean technologies and energy efficiency improvements) but exhibit inhibitory effects on emission-side transition (e.g., pollution abatement investments), likely due to misaligned incentives under top-down performance evaluation systems. In contrast, local green credit policies demonstrate consistent positive effects on both production and emission dimensions, reflecting localized adaptability to regional ecological and industrial contexts. (2) Synergy Mechanisms: Central-local policy synergy generates amplified green transition effects across both dimensions, primarily through four synergistic channels: (i) alleviating financing constraints for green innovation via enhanced credit allocation efficiency; (ii) stimulating green mergers and acquisitions (M&As) through fiscal-bank linkage incentives; (iii) scaling up targeted green credit supply based on dynamic regional benchmarking; and (iv) curbing greenwashing practices via multi-tiered monitoring systems. (3) Enterprise Heterogeneity: The synergistic effects are particularly pronounced for firms characterized by low tax contribution, robust internal governance, and geographical proximity to green financial hub. This suggests that policy effectiveness is contingent on enterprises’ institutional capacity to absorb and operationalize green financing. (4) Implementation Barriers and Catalysts: State-owned enterprises (SOEs) show lower policy responsiveness compared to private enterprises, attributable to soft budget constraints and political burden-sharing. Similarly, politically connected enterprises reduced compliance rates. Conversely, enterprises with executives possessing financial expertise demonstrate higher green patent outputs, underscoring the role of human capital in policy internalization. Theoretical contributions are twofold: (1) Institutional Contextualization: By integrating China’s unique central-local governance model-where central planning provides strategic coherence while local experimentation enables adaptive implementation-this study advances a dynamic institutional lens for analyzing green finance mechanisms; (2) Policy Interaction Framework: The systematic decomposition of central, local, and coordinated policy effects addresses the literature gap in understanding multi-level governance interactions in environmental regulation.

Central Green Credit Policies, Local Green Credit Policies, Policy Synergy, Green Transition, Green Development, Credit Financing, Enterprises “Greenwashing”