Regional cleaner production through carbon unlocking strategies assessment: lessons from major industrial hubs

Most studies on carbon efficiency and carbon unlocking have generally focused on aggregate performance or single-stage production processes, providing limited evidence on how carbon unlocking constraints arise from the interdependent production and environmental treatment stages and how these constraints evolve over time under heterogeneous conditions. To address this gap, this study constructs a two-stage dynamic network slacks-based measure (SBM) model based on a meta-frontier framework, dividing the carbon unlocking process into the production stage and the treatment stage, and conducts dynamic measurement and decomposition analysis for 29 provinces in China from 2011 to 2022. The results show that, under the meta-frontier, provincial carbon unlocking efficiency is generally lower than that under group-frontier, indicating significant regional technology gaps. Efficiency in the treatment stage is generally higher than in the production stage, with the latter constituting the main bottleneck to overall efficiency improvement. Further grouping analysis based on different development characteristics reveals systematic differences in the sources of carbon unlocking constraints and improvement paths across region types. High development and technology frontier regions need to focus more on treatment investment efficiency and abatement cost control, whereas regions with medium-to-low development levels, high carbon dependence, or technology catch-up characteristics face carbon unlocking bottlenecks mainly in the production stage, particularly in energy use patterns and carbon emission efficiency. By moving beyond aggregate or static assessments of carbon unlocking efficiency, this study provide a novel perspective on regional carbon unlocking efficiency, identify transferable unlocking pathways under different development conditions, and offer policy-relevant insights for countries with diverse economic structures and development stages seeking to advance carbon unlocking.