In the campaign-style enforcement, in addition to mobilizing local governments directly, the central government often mobilizes public participation, exerting pressure on local governments from above and below. Promoting sustainable public participation will be of great benefit to maintain the incentives for local governments and the achievements of campaign-style enforcement. We first explore how campaign-style enforcement affects public participation in the time dimension from a theoretical perspective: in the short term, campaign governance makes public participation possible by opening up political opportunities and promotes public participation by responding to their demands; however, the decline of public attention and the instability of the participation channels will threaten the sustainability of public participation in the long term. Second, we test the above inferences by collecting data on public petitions in two rounds of central inspection on ecological and environmental protection. The results show that: (1) the scale of public participation in the central ecological and environmental inspections tends to expand at the beginning but gradually shrinks, which makes it difficult to maintain long-term stability; (2) economic development factors are the main determinants of public participation compared to environmental pollution. It suggests that public participation in this process may not be motivated by the concerns for environmental protection but rather by demands for various issues of social governance arising from social development. These findings illustrate the dilemmas faced by public participation in campaign-style enforcement when it comes to achieving long-term effectiveness and regularity.