Abstract
The past decades have witnessed a surge of foodborne illnesses of diverse sources on every continent of the world, a testament of the complexity of the transformed supply chain of production, distribution, and consumption as well as the importance of global food safety governance. While the global health community continues to look to the WHO to address problems as such, the organization is arguably losing its institutional legitimacy for persistent governance inertia. The mandates and normative tools assigned by the WHO Constitution empower the WHO to actively engage and provide leadership in the governance of food safety, but the organization has comfortably nested in a soft approach, abstaining from assuming any international agreement for over 60 years. This chapter examines the WHO's normative capacities given by its Constitution and normative activities in practice to evaluate its influences in shaping and reshaping global food safety governance. While the mapping of this chapter resonates to the critiques that the WHO has not employed to the necessary extent the normative authority partly due to ossified bureaucracy, power politics, and budgetary weakness, this chapter further argues that the clear and enduring gap between the normative capacities and activities may ultimately render the organization's institutional legitimacy vulnerable and compromise its relevance as a whole. As a preliminary conclusion, this chapter offers a couple of recommendations for a stronger pivotal role in global food safety governance. It suggests that the WHO take active steps to build functional links with multiple stakeholders and partners, such as WTO and non-state actors, some of which have emerged as valid alternatives to the organization. The WHO needs to further solidify such functional links to coordinate efforts in global food safety, which may merit a more formal interinstitutional framework.