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How to fully motivate manufacturing enterprises to fulfill their environmental governance responsibilities and promote their green transformation and upgrading has become an important issue in China's high-quality economic development. The existing research mainly focuses on the environmental forcing effect of command-and-control environmental regulations, and the environmental incentive effect of soft tools such as green certification has received insufficient attention, and the conclusions are inconsistent. Based on the data of China's A-share listed manufacturing enterprises from 2015 to 2021, this study used the Notice on the Construction of Green Manufacturing System Issued by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology to empirically test the impact, mechanisms, and spillover effect of green factory certification, a government green certification system, on corporate environmental governance responsibilities by constructing a multi-time point DID model. The results showed that: ① The government's green certification system had a significant environmental incentive effect. Compared with non-certified enterprises, certified green factories could significantly encourage enterprises to actively fulfill their environmental governance responsibilities, such as environmental protection investment and green innovation. This result held after a series of robustness tests. ② Mechanism analysis showed that government green certification mainly promoted enterprises to actively fulfill their environmental governance responsibilities through three channels: cost effect, resource effect, and supervision effect. ③ The spillover effect test showed that government green certification could encourage enterprises in the same industry and other enterprises in the same city to simultaneously improve their environmental responsibilities. ④ The analysis of scale effect showed that government green certification could expand the output scale of enterprises, indicating that the environmental incentive effect of government green certification could be achieved without sacrificing the large-scale development of enterprises. ⑤ The heterogeneity test showed that the environmental incentive effect of the government green certification system was more pronounced in large-scale enterprises, high-polluting enterprises, and enterprises with a high shareholding ratio of long-term institutional investors. To accelerate the green and low-carbon transformation of the development mode, the government can, on the one hand, draw on the successful experience of green factories to develop other green certification tools and fully utilize the positive role of government green certification in green development. On the other hand, it is necessary to improve the incentive mechanisms and the market environment, where the government's green certification plays a role, and carry out targeted support for appropriate enterprises. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]