Is Innovation the Silver Bullet for Sustainability? Only Under Strong Governance: Evidence From the G20

The growing need to address the issue of ecological degradation has augmented the global focus on the strategies that balance economic growth and environmental sustainability. This paper highlights how green innovation can be used to improve ecological resilience by evaluating the connections between the ecological footprint of G20 economies between the years 1990 and 2023 in relation to the interrelationships of environmental technology, natural resource rents, ecological governance, and fiscal policy. The Method of Moments Quantile Regression (MMQR) model is a multi‐dimensional distributional and cross‐adjustment method that reveals time‐rich dynamics in the long run. The results show that green innovation may solely increase the stress of the environmental factors, without any regulatory control, but those adverse effects are significantly reduced and even mitigated with the strict ecological state measures. It is always a fact that reliance on natural resources makes the degradation of the ecology worse, but these impacts of fiscal policy vary depending on the environmental bearing and policy structure. The use of the innovation‐governance interaction phrase underscores the fact that technology solutions can be most effective in case they are implemented in strong institutional frameworks. This results in being able to point out that innovation cannot be a panacea for sustainability. It depends on the standards of governance and strategic policy harmony on the ecological benefits. This report offers critical policy recommendations on how to guide the transition of G20 into low‐carbon development, and it indicates that there is a need to coordinate policies that aim at integrating technology development and regulatory rigor, and sustainable financial planning.