Renewable Energy, Smart Platforms, and Women's Participation: Structural Levers of Sustainability and Climate Geopolitical Governance Under Saudi Vision 2030

The question of which structural levers actually enhance climate governance arises when hydrocarbon-dependent economies strive for low-carbon growth. In fact, this paper aims to analyze the impact of climate economy and ‎sustainability‎, digital transformation and ‎smart platform, economic development‎, trade openness and women's empowerment ‎and leadership on climate governance in short and long term in Saudi Arabia from 1990 to 2025 using the Autoregressive Distributed Lags (ARDL) approach. The unit root tests: Philipps-Perron (PP) and Augmented Dickey-Fuller (ADF) verify that all series are integrated of order one. The Wald test (F = 41.96) indicates the presence of long run relationships between variables. However, the Bounds test (F = 12.75) verify that long run cointegration relationships exist, and the CUSUM and CUSUMSQ plots verify parameter stability. The chosen ARDL(1,0,1,2,0,0) specification indicates that in the short term, female labor force participation (-0.122), digital transformation (-3.738 contemporaneous; -3.097 lagged), and renewable energy consumption (-1.537) all significantly lower per-capita emissions, while GDP effects cancel each other out across lags and trade openness is negligible. Long-term impacts like digital transformation (-6.955), renewable energy (-1.564), and women's empowerment (-0.125) are substantial at 1%, whereas trade openness and economic progress have no equilibrium influence. Therefore, as complementary tools of climate governance under Vision 2030, policy should prioritize expedited deployment of renewable energy, ongoing investment in e-government and smart platforms, and participation of women in the labor market.