Objective With China’s urbanization shifting from incremental expansion to stock optimization, urban renewal has become a national strategic priority for high quality development. As the fundamental unit of everyday urban life, the renewal of old communities is essential for improving grassroots governance capacity and residents’ well-being. However, community renewal faces a series of problems, including fragmented property rights, heterogeneous stakeholder demands, imbalances in power-responsibility allocation, and uneven governance performance. The traditional government-led, top-down renewal model has struggled to address increasingly complicated renewal challenges. To solve this issue, collaborative governance theory was introduced to emphasize multi-actor coordination, consensus building, and institutional integration. While existing studies have examined public participation in collaborative governance, there is limited systematic analysis of how different modes of collaborative governance during the community renewal influence the effects of collaborative governance. Accordingly, this study aims to construct an analytical framework for collaborative governance in community renewal, identify heterogeneity across governance modes, reveal the mechanisms shaping collaborative effectiveness and propose mode-specific optimization pathways to support sustainable community development in China.

Methods This study adopts a quantitative research approach. First, drawing on classical collaborative governance models and the institutional context of urban renewal in China, a government–market–resident collaborative governance framework is constructed. Community renewal practices are classified into three governance modes: a government-led mode, driven by administrative authority and public funding; a market-led mode, driven by capital and commercial operations; and a resident-led mode, driven by residents’ self-governance. Second, an evaluation indicator framework is developed across three modes: starting conditions (resource endowment), collaborative processes (information sharing, trust building, and consensus negotiation), and governance performance (execution effectiveness, transparency, and residential satisfaction). Data were collected through a structured questionnaire survey, conducted in Chongqing, a high-density city with extensive community renewal. Using a stratified sampling method based on the three governance modes, seven representative old communities were selected. A total of 700 questionnaires were distributed, and after data cleaning, 664 valid responses were retained, yielding an effective response rate of 94.8%. Multiple linear regression models were employed to examine how explanatory variables influence governance performance under each governance mode.

Results The empirical results reveal heterogeneity in governance mechanisms across the three modes. In the government-led mode, trust government and information sharing emerge as significant positive predictors of governance performance. Transparent policy frameworks and clear information channels play a central role in shaping residents’ trust. When residents perceive strong value alignment and institutional credibility, their willingness to cooperate increases substantially, reflecting a top-down transmission mechanism in which policy transparency fosters trust and facilitates consensus building, ultimately enhancing execution effectiveness. In the market-led mode, reaching consensus with the contractor and participating in renovation management are identified as the core drivers of effectiveness of collaborative governance. Residents value tangible improvements in spatial quality and timely project delivery brought by market actors. However, variables related to information transparency and procedural fairness are found insignificant, indicating that the effective supporting regulations have not yet been established. While market participation enhances efficiency, insufficient institutional arrangements for equitable participation may undermine trust, particularly when profit motives outweigh public interests. The resident-led mode exhibits a strong positive relationship between effectiveness of collaborative governance and neighborhood consensus as well as community emotional attachment. Among all explanatory factors, consensus with neighbors shows the strongest influence, underlying the central role of social capital. The significant negative effect of creating community chat groups and the weak significance of having opinions accepted indicate obstacles in converting social capital into institutionalized negotiation. Without formal discussion platforms, informal channels such as WeChat groups are insufficient to translate residents’ self-governance efforts into higher levels of satisfaction with the collaborative governance.

Conclusion Different modes of collaborative governance in community renewal exhibit distinct characteristics, requiring differentiated renewal optimization strategies. Findings show that in collaborative governance for community renewal, the government-led model relies on policy provision and resource integration, the market-led model emphasizes professional expertise and implementation efficiency, and the resident-led model depends on internal consensus and self-governance. In the government-led model, improving the effectiveness of collaborative governance should focus on governmental execution capacity. Its effectiveness does not hinge on unilateral governmental input, but on building a multi-stakeholder collaborative platform that builds trust between the government and residents through transparency in policies and funding, thereby building sustainable consensus, and promoting collaborative renewal. In the market-led model, transparency in market services and cooperation is fundamental. Future improvements require enhancing the supervision of the renovation process, conducting efficiency and residential needs assessments prior to renewal, and strengthening residents’ participation during the renewal process, so that renewal efficiency is balanced with residents’ daily needs. In the resident-led model, the effectiveness of collaborative governance is primarily shaped by neighborhood consensus. Such consensus relies on social capital to generate self-organizing motivation for renewal. However, due to the absence of formal discussion platforms and adequate supporting regulations, social capital is difficult to translate effectively into institutionalized negotiation. The core to improving this mode lies in promoting the transition of resident self-governance activities from being informal to becoming institutionalized and standardized.