Abstract: Exploring the coordinated development relationship between carbon emissions and green high-quality development from the perspective of new quality productive forces is of great significance to realize innovation-driven low-carbon transformation and high-quality development. Based on the mechanism of carbon emission-green high-quality development (CE-GH) coupling coordination, 30 provinces (autonomous regions and municipalities) in China were selected as research samples from 2012 to 2022, and the coupling coordination model, Kernel density estimation, exploratory spatio-temporal data analysis (ESTDA), quantile regression, and optimal parameter geodetector were applied to study the CE-GH system coupling coordination spatio-temporal divergence pattern, transition law, and driving mechanism. The results show that the coupling coordination is evolving from dysfunctional to coordinated time sequence, and the space forms a concave pattern of eastern leading-central lagging-western catching up, which manifests a composite situation of cross-border cross-level transition and overall optimization-local differentiation coexisting. Exploratory spatio-temporal analysis reveals that the southeast and northwest regions have time paths >1, local dynamics, and the southwest is stable. The curvature is >1, the coupling coordination is markedly migrating, and synergistic growth accounts for 53.4%, with positive synergistic growth mainly in the central and western part of China, and negative synergy in the east. The spatio-temporal transition shows that most of the regions belong to the transition type Ⅳ (92.4% of spatio-temporal variation), the local spatial structure shows path dependence and locking characteristics, and the spatio-temporal network pattern is dominated by positive correlation (86.2%). The negative correlation shows that there is a certain degree of spatial and temporal competition. The transition mode and driving mechanism evolve from the northwest to the southeast, and there exist four kinds of transition driving modes, including government-human resources, industry-technology, government-human resources-society, and industry-technology-data, and the driving effect is stronger than that of a single factor. In the future, based on the driving mechanism of different transition modes, regional synergy strategies can be formulated differently in terms of policy manpower optimization, industrial technology upgrading, digital innovation, etc., so as to realize the coordinated development of CE-GH coupling.