Abstract: The imbalance between the system demand and supply of China′s current environmental responsibility has forced an institutional arrangement of “government-enterprise co-responsibility” with Chinese characteristics. “Government-enterprise co-responsibility” in environmental governance can be subdivided into three models, namely, “government-enterprise co-responsibility” under the main responsibility of the government,“government-enterprise co-responsibility” under the main responsibility of the enterprise, and “government-enterprise co-responsibility” under the same responsibility between government and enterprises. The theoretical basis for the construction of the system of “government-enterprise co-responsibility” is that there exists vertical synergy in the stage of environmental danger and risk and horizontal synergy in the stage of residual risk. “Government-enterprise co-responsibility” is essentially a “common but differentiated responsibility”, so it does not break through the basic principle of “self-responsibility”. In order to eliminate the gap of environmental responsibility between the enterprise and the government, we should take the “general behavior controls” as the guiding ideology and the “comprehensive governance” as the basic principle, and supplemented with distribution coordination, investigated coordination, autonomous coordination and socialization of responsibility coordination mechanism on environmental responsibility to improve the institutional arrangements of “government-enterprise co-responsibility”.

Key words: government environmental responsibility, enterprise environmental responsibility, coordination mechanism, “government-enterprise co-responsibility”