Building Service-Oriented Government: Lessons, Challenges and Prospects

Providing quality public service is one of the essential functions of a government. In the turbulent time, however, governments worldwide are experiencing a variety of unprecedented challenges to meet citizens' increasing demands and expectations. In China, building a service-oriented government and a harmonious society is central to the 12th Five-Year Plan and challenges the governance philosophies, capacities and competencies of Chinese government at every level. Researchers of Nanyang Centre for Public Administration (NCPA) at Nanyang Technological University systematically examined the concept of service-oriented government in the context of China and developed an assessment scheme to evaluate the performance of building service-oriented government in Chinese cities. Under the auspices of the Lien Foundation in Singapore, based on the assessment scheme, they conducted large-scale telephone surveys of citizens and businesses in 32 major Chinese cities in 2011. This book presents their findings and empirical studies on public service performance, citizen satisfaction, political trust and government transparency based on the data collected from the 2011 Lien project. Moreover, it also includes selected papers presented at the 2012 Lien International Conference on Public Administration in Singapore. Contributed by scholars from Mainland China, the US, Hong Kong and Singapore, these papers discuss various important issues related with building a service-oriented government including public ethical values, the roles of NGO, social accountability, urban integration, performance measurement and emotional labor in public service.