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Abstract
The spatial spillover of food safety risks and the regional mobility of food enterprises make territorial governance inefficient, which calls for interregional collaboration to enhance food safety in the context of territorial governance. However, due to the lack of a collaborative food safety governance scheme, there has been no substantial progress in interregional collaboration for food safety governance in China. Therefore, this paper refines the three key elements of collaboration from the perspective of supply chain, economy and geography and puts forward the optimal zoning scheme of interregional collaboration for food safety governance. By analysing the evolution trend of interregional collaboration, we found China has already produced the germination of interregional collaboration in terms of food safety issues, though it has been slow and volatile. To promote the process of interregional collaboration, this paper also analyses the determinants of the coordinated regulatory performance of food safety. The results show that collaborative actions within regions can facilitate coordinated regulatory practice. The interregional difference in regulatory intensity and consumption patterns hinder the interregional collaboration for food safety governance, while the interregional difference in industrial structure inversely promotes the coordinated regulatory performance. These findings lend support to effective promotion of interregional collaboration.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
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15 Ibid.
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17 Ibid.; Chen et al., “Supply Chain Operational Risk Mitigation,” 2186–2199.
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Funding
Notes on contributors
Yu Wang
Dr Yu Wang is a research associate at Zhejiang Academy of Agricultural Sciences. Her research interests cover food safety management, public governance and agricultural trade. She has participated in three national research projects funded by NSFC and Ministry of Education of China, and two international collaborative programs.
Dong Li
Dr Dong Li, Reader in Operations and Marketing Department, Management School, University of Liverpool. He is an experienced researcher in Supply Chain Management, in particular, sustainable supply chains and green logistics. He has been awarded as a research project leader by EC H2020, FP7, ERDF and UK Newton, EPSRC, TSB for research projects on sustainable food supply chains, green logistics, local food logistics, green packaging in supply chains and integrated maritime logistics systems in the last decade. He has participated in research collaboration funded by China NSFC on sustainable city logistics research. He has intensively published in the supply chain management (more than 60 papers) and highly ranked in Thomson Reuters Web of Science in the food supply chain management area.
Jiehong Zhou
Prof. Jiehong Zhou is a professor in Agricultural and Economic Management, Zhejiang University. Her research focuses on food safety and sustainable supply chain management. She has sponsored 13 national research projects funded by NSFC, NSSF, Ministry of Education of China, 15 provincial research projects and 2 international collaboration projects. Her research findings have been published in more than 60 refereed papers in food safety and sustainable supply chain areas, including more than 20 SSCI/SCI papers and over 20 papers published in leading journals in China. Her monograph published in English about food safety management in China is the first one that systematically introduces China’s food safety to foreign scholars and it had been listed in Social Sciences and Asian Studies.