Collaborative Governance of Food Safety in China: Institutional Deconstruction, Practical Dilemmas and Pathways for Improvement

China has established a relatively comprehensive institutional framework for the collaborative governance of food safety. According to the relationships and institutional composition of governance entities, this framework can be deconstructed into three parts: an authoritative regulatory system centered on the government, a market self-regulation system under government guidance, and a social participation system supported by the government. However, the collaborative governance of food safety still faces multiple challenges: At the level of authoritative regulation centered on the government, collaborative difficulties exist among internal governmental entities. At the level of market self-regulation guided by the government, there are bottlenecks including a lack of endogenous motivation for individual self-regulation and insufficient institutional development and resource coordination for collective self-regulation. Social participation supported by the government faces practical challenges such as dual limitations in public participation motivation and governance capacity, the alienation of rights-protection motives leading to malicious claims, and the role conflict and functional weakening of social organization. Regarding this, efforts should be made to enhance the effectiveness of government regulation guided by holistic governance, stimulate the potential for market self-regulation under the principle of classified guidance, and cultivate a social co-governance ecosystem under the principle of supportive guidance, gradually developing towards a food safety collaborative governance model of “an active government, an efficient market, and an orderly society”.