Providing public facilities in developing countries has always been a chanllenge. In recent years some progress has been made with the introduction of‘new public management’techniques。Since the 1980s,This has become a theoretical backbone for administrative reform and for public management in lower income countries. The broad underlying idea is to improve the efficiency,productivity,and effectiveness of public management by applying as many principles and reform techniques used by private enterprises as possible,while designing institutions that bring out performance-oriented entrepreneurial behavior in public management. The approach involves reviewing the division of roles between the public and the private sectors(e.g.carry out privatization and outsourcing to the private sector),reforming administrative management methods(e.g.,shifts towards agencies and the introduction of performance management),and reforming budgeing and fiscal management. Progress seems to be being made regarding the use of new public management techniques but it is slow.
In addition to intellectual and institutional challenges,there are issues regarding the information inputs into public facilities planning. One important development is the advent of geographic information systems(GIS)for handing date and for its digital mapping on computers. It allows large amounts of date to be sorted and displayed in ways not possible before – Yeo and Chow’s paper reproduced here is an exampleof this. In itself,though,better date dose not make for better decisions;much depends on how the date is used. The importance of GIS is that it can help reveal the spatial implications of providing public facilities and the various parties that will be affected. With the appropriate structures this should assist in more informed and transparent planning.
However one looks at it,providing public facilities is inevitably controversial;there are questions of what should be provided,how much should be provided,what form it should take,who should provide it,who should access to it ,who should pay for it,what should be done for those aversely affected and so on . The papers reproduced in this volume hopefully offer some ways of thinking about these types of issue and offer some tools that can offer guidance to the practitioners. That is,at least,our aim.
不要软件直译,或者在线翻译的那种!